Vodafone Australia suffered a major nationwide outage today that may have affected millions of customers.

Customers of Australia’s third-largest telecommunications company in Darwin, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra reported having no service for several hours early this morning.

At roughly 11am, Vodafone, which is owned by TPG Telecom, issued a statement saying it was aware customers were experiencing “intermittent issues” with its network. It said the issue “has been isolated and resolved, and services are now being progressively restored”.

However, many people online were still reporting problems with the network hours later.

What caused the outage?

In its statement, Vodafone said “the disruption was caused by a power outage at one of our network hubs”.

A power outage, though it seems unthinkable in an era when you would expect backup power and batteries to be installed in all key facilities, could cause equipment and systems to go offline, malfunction or fail.

The nationwide nature of the outage suggests the Vodafone network includes a centralised “core........

© The Conversation