Network fault led to Vodafone SMS outage
Summary: A network fault at an exchange has been blamed for Vodafone's Easter Sunday SMS outage, that left thousands of customers unable to send text messages.
A network fault at an exchange has been blamed for Vodafone's Easter Sunday SMS outage, which left thousands of customers unable to send text messages.
"The disruption to SMS services on Sunday afternoon was caused by a network fault in one of our exchanges. Engineers are currently completing their investigation, but the fault was an isolated issue that affected the core network elements which manage our SMS traffic," Vodafone told ZDNet Australia.
In the course of the service disruption, customers took to Twitter and Facebook to lodge complaints about the service, with "vodafail" becoming the top trending topic in Australia on Twitter for a day, and a Facebook group devoted to the outage gaining 20,000 members in the time that SMS services were offline.
In a blog post apologising for the outage, the company has offered customers 12 hours of free SMS services between 8am and 8pm on 1 May, however, in comments to the post, some customers are less than pleased with this offer.
"What about those people like myself who already have unlimited free SMS included in our plan? I gotta say this is a bit of a joke ... You could just fix all the towers and give us some half decent reception," one customer said.
The most recent outage comes as Vodafone Hutchison Australia has embarked on a massive upgrade of its network infrastructure using Huawei technology. The upgrade was announced after months of complaints from customers of poor 3G data and voice coverage on the Vodafone and 3 networks.
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Talkback
I guess the big issue is not so much that there was a fault - I think we can all accept that they happen. But why does it seem to take so long to remedy? Seven hours mightn't seem long to engineers - but to customers it is.
when does business continuity planning kick in?
how long does their disaster recovery plan take to activate?
sms might be a nice network value-add feature, but it's becomming increasingly critical comms for many people and businesses.
Seems like an obvious single point of failure, so why no redundancy?
The way the Internet has grown in Australia is exactly the same----we're all told to back up our computer files, but no one thinks about backing up the hardware as well. For the high profit margin being made in Australia, all these networks should be operating to at least Tertiary Redundancy.
TCP/IP is a protocol with built-in redundancy, but none of the Australia hardware is cross linked anywhere, so when one bit fails, EVERYTHING past that point becomes unavailable.