Vodacom apologises for disappearing data

Several MyBroadband readers recently reported that the expiry date of their data was not in alignment with Vodacom’s 2-month policy on certain contracts.

This meant that data which was meant to have carried over was no longer reflected in their accounts, and their new data was said to be expiring in just one month.

One user told MyBroadband that they had signed up to a 90GB-per-month contract which included the following:

– 30GB per Month x 24 months (two-month expiration or validity period)
– Service Provider Incentive 30GB (one-month expiration or validity period)
– Night Owl 30 GB (two-month expiration or validity period)

On 19 July, they found they had lost access to most of their data, with only their Service Provider Incentive data that had been allocated at the beginning of the month remaining.

Data they lost access to included:

– Data allocated on 1 June that was meant to expire on 1 August
– Data allocated on 1 July that was meant to expire on 1 September
– Night Owl Data allocated on 1 June that was meant to expire on 1 August
– Night Owl Data allocated on 1 July that was meant to expire on 1 September

Fixing the issue

In an attempt to remedy the issue, the reader called Vodacom’s support line the next day and was told that their issue would be passed onto the support agent’s superiors, who would call the reader on Monday 22 July. On this date, they received an SMS saying that the query was still being looked into.

As of 1 August, they had still not received a response. All of their data – including data that had carried over from the previous month – was now set to expire on 1 September in the Vodacom App – despite some of this data supposedly having a two-month expiration date, and only having been allocated on that day.

Later that evening, Vodacom made the appropriate changes to ensure that the data was correctly reflected in the reader’s account.

The reader also said that one of their friends had suffered the same issue, and also had the matter resolved on 1 August.

The reader said that while they had alerted Vodacom to the issue 11 days before it was resolved, it was fixed in under 12 hours after MyBroadband’s correspondence with Vodacom.

Vodacom responds

A Vodacom spokesperson spoke to MyBroadband and confirmed that the company had not intentionally changed the expiry periods for data on its contracts. Instead, the issues customers faced were related to a system error.

“Unfortunately, we experienced isolated incidents during a planned Vodacom system upgrade, where certain tariff plans consolidated the display of balance expiry dates,” said Vodacom.

“This was related only to the manner in which the balances are displayed and not the actual expiry of the data allocations which did not change.”

Vodacom added that its technical team was remedying this issue so that all data expiry dates are reflected correctly.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused.”