Virgin Mobile's network partially collapsed on Friday night, causing one-third of its 1 million postpaid customers in Australia to suffer from no phone service on Saturday.

To make up for the service outage, Virgin apologised to its customers and offered to credit clients who were disconnected because of the service interruption credit with a whole day's access fee as compensation on their next bill.

"I would like to sincerely apologise to those being affected by this outage and let you know that we have all hands on deck to resolve this. We absolutely appreciate the urgency of the situation and are doing everything we can to get things back up and running ASAP," said David Scribner, hear of Virgin Mobile Australia.

Because of the network outage, clients could not call or receive or send text messages on Saturday morning, leading Virgin Mobile to use social media to communicate with customers. It promised to send more updates via Facebook and Twitter when more information becomes available.

Although some fortunate users got back their service by midday on Saturday, Virgin said the problem has yet to be fully fixed.

This is the second time in six weeks that a major network disruption affected Virgin Mobile customers, although in March those affected were prepaid customers' voice and data service for the whole evening.