Vodafone Idea Suffers Major Outage: Thousands Of Users Hit By Total Blackout

Vodafone Idea (Vi) network suffered a massive outage in the early morning of Friday and thousands of users reported a total blackout as they were unable to make calls or get any signal. The network downtime has been confirmed by the outage report platform Downdetector which saw a massive spike of over 1,500 reports around 1:02 AM in the country with the actual outage faced starting from 12:00 AM. 

Most of the outage report on the platform was related to no signal and over 25 percent of the Vi users complained about total blackout which is not a rosy situation to be in. It seems the outage at Vi was not part of a regular drill and many of its users lashed out at the telecom operator for the blackout in the middle of the night. 

The platform’s user report is not limited to one part of the country as Vi users from across cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata among others have been majorly affected by the long outage. 

After a few hours, Vi confirmed the issue with the following statement, “Our network services were briefly impacted in NCR during the early hours of Friday( April 18) due to a technical issue. The issue has been resolved and all services are now back to normal. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank our users for their patience and understanding"

Not having the Vi network means people were unable to get OTPs for payments and food delivery in India. Late night usage of network in the country sees a massive spike because of better reception but the outage clearly affected them as well. Here’s what the social chatter around the Vi network outage looked like:

Some of these users have even talked about porting to other networks to avoid facing these outages. Vi 5G launch is also widely in the news, even though its availability is limited to select cities as of now. The much-delayed 5G launch has already seen the operator face a massive exodus of subscribers, who were willing to move to their rivals for better service and 5G network speeds.