Numerous Vodacom customers have in recent days complained that they were unable to activate Apple’s popular iMessage and FaceTime services on their iPhones.<\/p>\n
MyBroadband was made aware of the issue after a reader said he was unable to activate and link the services to his Vodacom number.<\/p>\n
His complaint was supported by several posts from MyBroadband Forum members<\/strong><\/a> who were experiencing the issue as well.<\/p>\n In order to enable iMessage and FaceTime on a number used on an iOS device, an iPhone user must first activate the services, which are authenticated in a process during which an SMS is sent to a UK-based phone number.<\/p>\n However, several Vodacom contract customers reported that attempting to do so would return a “failed to activate” message, in addition to an SMS failure notification.<\/p>\n The issue was not only occurring for new activations but also happened whenever an iPhone was restarted and iMessage attempted to re-authenticate the number.<\/p>\n The problem did not appear to impact verification of email accounts, however.<\/p>\n Users also noted that Vodacom was charging R1.50 for every failed attempt to activate the service.<\/p>\n Several users suggested a workaround which was to load airtime on the affected SIM, as this had previously fixed the problem for them.<\/p>\n However, because certain Vodacom contracts do not allow for loading additional airtime, this was not an option for many complaining customers.<\/p>\n Various affected users had contacted both Vodacom and Apple in an attempt to fix the issue but neither were able to assist over the course of several days.<\/p>\n Vodacom told MyBroadband that it was aware of the activation issue, which it said had affected a very small number of its customers.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the company said the problem was not limited to Vodacom South Africa and had impacted certain customers in the UAE, Portugal, Czech Republic and Ghana as well.<\/p>\n The cause of the issue had been a temporary glitch at one of the suppliers that Vodacom with on the activation service.<\/p>\n “Our technicians engaged with our international partners to identify the problem,” Vodacom said.<\/p>\n “We can now confirm that as of yesterday [Thursday] afternoon, the matter was resolved,” Vodacom stated.<\/p>\n “We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused,” Vodacom added.<\/p>\n The operator did not comment on whether customers who were billed for the failed authentications would be refunded.<\/p>\n Numerous Vodacom customers have in recent days complained they were unable to activate Apple’s popular iMessage and FaceTime services on their iPhones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":390172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[10416,35,8883,1125,41],"class_list":["post-390106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","tag-facetime","tag-headline","tag-imessage","tag-iphone","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":390212,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390106\/revisions\/390212"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Activation issue resolved<\/h3>\n
Now read: Mobile subscribers compared \u2013 MTN vs Vodacom<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"