Feature

Voda Reliability on Thin Ice

Vodafone have not had a great week. First of all their email service, vodafone.net, has been down for the past few days, now they admit to losing votes cast for ITV's Dancing on Ice.
 
Vodafone.net broke down on Friday afternoon leaving users without access to their email accounts.

The usual login page was replaced with a message stating:
"We regret to inform you that the Vodafone Mail service remains unavailable. However, please be assured we are working to restore service to you as quickly as possible and we will ensure you receive regular updates on this site with regards to the status of the incident."

Updates to the site included "We are continuing to work through our recovery plan and anticipate having service restored Tuesday 20 March." and on Tuesday that Voda is "still working towards service restoration today".

To top all that off, it has now been revealed that 11500 text votes for ITV's ice skating competition Dancing on Ice were delayed over the weekend. The votes did not reach ITV until Monday morning, and were therefore not counted.

Voda were quick to point out that they wouldn't have made much difference to the outcome of the competition final, won by former England rugby union international Kryan Bracken, as a total of 1.5m votes were cast.

"Vodafone UK has confirmed that due to a technical problem 11,500 text votes for the Dancing on Ice final were not delivered to ITV until Monday morning," the network said.

"These votes represented only a small minority of votes cast by Vodafone customers. All other texts were successfully delivered.

"The Vodafone customers who were affected received a message to tell them that the vote was too late and Vodafone UK will this week be automatically refunding those customers the cost of their text."

As of this morning everything seems to be back to normal. Texts seem to be going through without delay and  Voda have announced they are "now pleased to inform that we have restored service to the Vodafone Mail service. We suffered a failure which has now been rectified and service has been resumed." The outage was put down to simultaneous hardware and software failure.

At least the gremlins that have been plaguing Voda didn't affect the new benificaries of their Formula1 sponsorship at the weekend.

McLaren Mercedes occupied 2nd and 3rd spots at the Australian Grand Prix  on Sunday following an excellent drive from British F1 newcomer Lewis Hamilton.