Airtel and Vodafone-Idea users were grappling with service disruptions on Monday afternoon as they were unable to make calls or access internet.
The issue was reported across the country, including major cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Other cities like Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Guwahati and Madurai were also facing a large number of outages.
Why is Airtel and Vodafone-Idea down?
The telecom majors were reportedly impacted by a technical issue but there is no official response regarding this. Airtel acknowledged that it is experiencing network outage and its team is working to rectify the issue as soon as possible in order to restore the services. "We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused," Airtel Cares posted on X.
Hi Amit, we are currently experiencing a network outage, our team is actively working to resolve the issue and restore services promptly. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. Team Airtel https://t.co/2G23qpK1Kp
— Airtel Cares (@Airtel_Presence) August 18, 2025
An Airtel spokesperson quoted by PTI said that a major part of the issue has already been resolved. "Our engineers are at work to resolve this fully. We deeply regret any inconvenience," the representative said.
Airtel disruptions were mostly found on mobile phones, according to outage tracker Downdetector, which reported that the issues started popping up around 3.30 pm. At least 3,600 people have been impacted by the outage so far. Over 51 per cent of users could not make calls while 31 per cent were struggling with internet access and another 18 per cent grappling with no signal issues.
There were reports about Jio's outages around 5 pm with more than 200 users complaining of disruptions in services, according to Downdetector. Around 54 per cent Jio users could not access internet while 33 per cent could not connect to JioFiber broadband and 13 per cent were not able to make calls, it said. However, a statement by Jio to THE WEEK said Jio network has been operating normally throughout the day with no operational issues. "All Jio-to-Jio calls and calls from Jio to other non-impacted networks have been working seamlessly. The only problem observed was in calls made by Jio numbers to a specific impacted network customers, due to downtime on that network’s end. This did not affect Jio customers calling within the Jio network or connecting to any other networks," the statement added.
The Vodafone-Idea outage, which hit Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai and Jaipur, was limited compared to rival telecom majors. It reported just around 50 outages by 6 pm, as per Downdetector.
