Why did Vodafone go down for four hours yesterday? Experts say a cyberattack 'can't be ruled out' after outage left hundreds of thousands of Brits offline

Vodafone experienced a four-hour network outage on October 13th, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the UK without internet and mobile services. The company attributed the disruption to a "non-malicious software issue" with a vendor partner, which they stated has since been resolved and the network has fully recovered. However, cybersecurity experts have suggested that a cyberattack cannot be ruled out as a potential cause. They noted that while Vodafone's explanation points to a technical fault, the severity and suddenness of the outage, which affected landline internet for 69% of reported issues at its peak, could also be indicative of a deliberate attack. Experts also mentioned that a significant internal error or a "silly little mistake" by an employee with high-level access could have caused such a widespread failure. The nature of the outage, affecting critical infrastructure, highlights the ongoing vulnerability of large telecommunications systems and the importance of resilience. While some experts ... download the app to read more