The outage also affected Telefonica Deutschland and Deutsche Telekom, who said that otherwise their networks were running normally.
On Monday night, Vodafone Group told Bloomberg that its German operations were returning to normal after “massive restrictions” to data and phone services across the country.
The problem impacted 2G, 3G and 4G networks, as well as the MeinVodafone app and web services.
Control failures
The operator said the outage was caused by control equipment failing in Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin, causing problems for more than three hours and cutting off more than 100,000 customers.
The worst affected areas were in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and other main cities.
The customers who were shut out of the network were reconnected at 3:30 p.m. and network traffic was normalising by 5 p.m.
Position in German market
Vodafone has apologised. Its 2020 revenues from the German market are expected to be about €5 billion.
This equates to a market share of 19.3%, behind Deutsche Telekom with 31.7% and Telefonica Deutschland 25.5%, according to the VATM telecoms lobby.
How much churn follows Monday’s failure remains to be seen, and the inquest into the causes followed by possible repercussions from regulators no doubt will rumble on for months.