Vodafone today reported that it is dealing with some serious network outages related to a break-in at its network control center, which took place at around 1 a.m.
According to the blog, some "specialist network equipment and IT hardware" was stolen, which resulted in loss of service that was "mainly confined to parts of the M4 corridor and some areas either side."
While initial reports claimed that up to 4 million customers were being affected, Vodafone called those numbers "grossly exaggerated." The company, which currently counts over 19 million total customers, says that several hundred thousand may have been affected.
As of noon in the U.K., where the outages took place, Vodafone was reporting that voice services were largely back up and running but that SMS and data services were still down. The company expects to have things back to normal by the afternoon.
Vodafone says that it has other similar sites like the one that was infiltrated last night but that it had not experienced anything of this nature in the past. The company says all of its sites are "protected by high level security systems." Vodafone was reviewing these systems with the police in light of the break-in.
Vodafone says the incident did not impact the privacy of customers' data.