UPDATE 2:15 p.m.: Vodafone engineers are working to restore mobile phone coverage for thousands of Western Australians affected by an outage this morning.
A spokeswoman for the mobile network said a transmission link failure was responsible for the outage, which began around 9am.
She said engineers were working hard to resolve the problem and hoped to restore national coverage within an hour.
“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. We know how important it is for our customers to stay connected and please be assured that we are working as hard as possible to restore services,” she said.
Users took to social media to report the outage, which many discovered when they saw an “SOS only” message on their cell phones.
Unable to connect to 2G 3G 4G networks with @VodafoneAU
This will change today, thanks for your time and for letting me know about the outage #Oh wait— Tom Atkinson (@Tommy_A7) June 19, 2014
Vodafone was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in Perth, with users bringing back the hashtag “vodafail” which has been widely used during previous network outages.
Others tweeted their disappointment at not being able to make business calls during the outage.
A company spokeswoman could not estimate exactly how many Western Australian mobile phone users were affected, but it was believed thousands were without coverage.
At 10.20am, a Vodafone spokeswoman said engineers hoped coverage would be restored within the hour, but by 3.20pm the company admitted some WA customers were “still experiencing issues” with its data services.