Egypt fines Vodafone $596,405 for service outage

Egypt’s telecoms regulator NTRA said on Monday it had fined the national branch of mobile operator giant Vodafone 10 million Egyptian pounds ($596,405) over a coverage outage last week.

The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) said it made the “unprecedented” move after services dropped “for several hours, in multiple regions” on June 3 just just ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday which marks the end of Ramadan.

NTRA also called Vodafone for “the need to compensate subscribers affected by this interruption”.

Many Vodafone Egypt users last week had taken to social media to voice their dissatisfaction. The company later on Thursday sent a text message to users apologising for “the network’s performance” and offering up free internet packages up to 10G as compensation.