June 9 (Reuters) - Thousands of British customers of
Vodafone Group Plc, the world's second-biggest mobile
operator, faced call connection problems on Tuesday evening,
although they were resolved within an hour.
At the peak of the issue, the number of cases in the UK of
customers struggling to make and receive calls reached close to
10,000, according to Downdetector.com, a website which monitors
outages.
Customers complained on social media in large numbers.
The issue for most customers seemed to be resolved within an
hour, with Vodafone saying it was caused by a change the company
had made to block a range of telephone numbers used to make spam
calls.
"We'd like to apologise to any customers who struggled to
make phone calls this evening," Vodafone said in a statement.
"We had an incident at around 17.20, which was fixed at
18.10. The service is now fully back to normal. Any customer
struggling to make a call should quickly turn their phone off
and on again to restart."
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Dan
Grebler)