05 September 2019

Egyptian authorities fined the national branch of the mobile phone giant E£10m over a coverage outage in June just ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday.

The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) said it made the “unprecedented” move after services dropped “for several hours, in multiple regions” on June 3rd just before the holiday which marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

NTRA also stressed “the need to compensate subscribers affected by this interruption” after many Vodafone Egypt users took to social media to voice their discontent.

The operator  sent a text message to users apologising for “the network’s performance” and offered up free internet packages as compensation.

Vodafone Egypt is positioned ahead of three other national operators: Orange, Etisalat and We.