Vodafone Egypt customers woke up on Tuesday, 5 March, to find no cell service on their phones, leading to Vodafone facing a fine of EGP 20.5 million.
Service was suspended in various locations all over Cairo on Tuesday, and Vodafone customers, totaling 47.7 million according to a report in December, took to social media to voice their complaints about the outage.
The temporary disruption in the 4G network caused some users to switch to 3G to regain cell service, indicating issues with the fourth-generation VOLTE network coverage required for mobile internet services and high-quality voice calls.
Vodafone immediately worked on restoring all services and successfully achieved that in over five hours.
Egypt’s National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) formed an emergency technical committee immediately after the malfunction occurred to identify its causes, assess the impact of the disruption on users, and determine the duration of the outage, and the affected areas.
As part of the user rights protective rules of NTRA, Vodafone sent all its users free minutes and megabytes. Another rule that is part of the licenses granted to companies operating in the Egyptian market includes escalating measures and penalties in cases of service interruption and harm to subscribers.
The Authority announced in a press statement on 7 March that after detecting a technical malfunction in some of the main network devices, Vodafone Egypt will pay a fine of EGP 20.5 million.
NTRA emphasized the necessity of taking all corrective actions to ensure the continuity of service provision and avoid the recurrence of network failures that affect users, meeting their needs, safeguarding their rights, and increasing their satisfaction with the services they receive.
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