At a time of the year when people were enjoying the Easter festivities, some Vodafone customers in Australia found that they were unable to send SMS texts on Easter Sunday, apparently due to network problems.

Thousands of Vodafone customers were unable to send text messages on Easter Sunday, due to what Vodafone is claiming was a network fault at an exchange. During the service disruption a number of customers took to Facebook and Twitter to voice their complaints about the service in what was known as “vodafail”. During the SMS outage a Facebook group which was devoted to the issue gaining 20,000 members, whilst the SMS services was offline and “vodafail” becoming the top trending topic on Twitter for a day in Australia.

Vodafone told ZDNet Australia “The disruption to SMS services on Sunday afternoon was caused by a network fault in one of our exchanges. Engineers are currently completing their investigation, but the fault was an isolated issue that affected the core network elements which manage our SMS traffic,”.

In a blog post Vodafone tried to appease their customers by apologising for the outage and offering customers 12 hours of free SMS services on 1 May between 8am and 8pm. However, this gesture by Vodafone did not go down too well with all of their customers, as some have plans, which give them unlimited free SMS anyway.

This is not the first time that Vodafone customers have had a problem with the SMS service going down, as UK customers suffered the same problem when a Vodafone exchange centre in Basingstoke suffered a break in on February 28th, 2011 — see full article here. Have you suffered with any Vodafone network issues? If so, please let us know.