Why Vodafone's outage shows up critical national infrastructure failings

Just days after Steve Knibbs, director at Vodafone Business Security Enhanced, wrote on the company’s website about the importance of securing UK business supply chains, the company’s customers faced an outage that lasted hours. Vodafone claimed it had experienced a software problem with one of its partners.

In his article Knibbs wrote: “If your partners are vulnerable, that vulnerability extends to your own business as well.”

While Knibbs was referring to cybersecurity, an outage downstream is absolutely a vulnerability for Vodafone. In other words, its own supply chain had a weakness that caused a full network outage, impacting many of its fixed broadband and mobile broadband customers. The mobile phone service itself was also unavailable, with customers reporting that their devices could only make emergency calls.

It’s hard to fathom how disruptive losing access to your mobile network can be. Many of us travel by air and are accustomed to being offline while on a plane. While a smartphone in Flight Mode is unable to send and receive mobile data or use call functionality, airline passengers can easily use the payment app on their device to buy beverages, food and shop for duty free items. No internet access is required.

But imagine leaving home with no wallet, just a mobile phone. Perhaps you are just taking the dog for a walk or going to a gym class. Clearly, unless you need to do something on your phone while walking the dog or during the gym workout, no mobile connectivity is needed.

Let’s say, you decide after the walk or gym class to pop into the supermarket. Maybe there’s no milk in the fridge. It really shouldn’t matter if the mobile network is down, because making payments is a critical service and our economy relies 100% on the ability for customers to pay for the products and services they wish to purchase using any approved payment mechanism. In fact the UK’s National Protective Authority classifies finance as critical national infrastructure. People need to be able to get cash from cash machines and given the move to a cashless society, they should be able to make a payment using a payment card or a smartphone.

But in some instances, and Computer Weekly can vouch that this definitely occurred during the Vodafone network outage, the Google Pay wallet app failed to do its job -which is essentially about  providing a convenient payment method for smartphone users – because it could not authenticate over the internet.

Commenting on the outage, Melanie Pizzey, CEO and founder of the Global Payroll Alliance, said: “For businesses reliant on Vodafone for mobile and internet connectivity for day-to-day operations, it likely caused widespread delays and a noticeable dip in productivity.”

Any downtime is unacceptable.