Vodafone Is Offering Free Data This Weekend

By way of apology for its large-scale network outage yesterday, Vodafone has announced that this weekend its customers can use as much data as they want — for free.

Picture: Getty Images

Vodafone suffered the outage yesterday following a transmission failure in Western Australia at 11am AEST. As the fix for that rolled in around 1pm, according to a statement from Vodafone, “problems occurred which had an impact on the network nationally” which then created issues for Vodafone customers nationwide.

Vodafone states that with the exception of WA all services were back online by 4:10pm. Western Australia was restored by 6:30pm.

By way of apology, Vodafone’s announced that they won’t charge a cent for any data usage by Vodafone customers from midnight (AEST) Friday 20 June to 3:00am (AEST), Monday 23 June 2014.

It’s a nice gesture on Vodafone’s part, and it will be interesting to see if Optus does similar as it suffered issues with parts of its network yesterday as well. It could however easily backfire on the telco if it can’t keep the network running smoothly, given it’s a bit of an open invitation for people to hit data-heavy applications such as torrenting that you’d never normally entertain on costly mobile connections.


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