With its prepaid credit recharge system experiencing a downtime much of the whole day on Thursday, Vodafone was forced to resort on providing free calls and text services to its prepaid customers yesterday.

Vodafone has admitted late morning yesterday that there was an issue on its recharge system and its customer service director Cormac Hodgkinson reported on the company blog that customers would not be able to recharge their account though fixes were being worked on by the company.

However, Hodgkinson gave assurance that "prepaid customers with existing credit are able to make and receive calls as normal," as he admitted that the glitch "is preventing our customer service staff in-store and within our contact centre from manually applying prepaid recharge credit to our customers' accounts."

Yet a little later, Vodafone had admitted in another blog that the problem would persist for the rest of the day and instead offered free services to customers affected by the system meltdown. The telco assured that its prepaid services would remain free until the system glitch has been resolved, which it said should be online by late morning of Friday.

Despite the free calls and text messages given by Vodafone to compensate for the inconvenience, subscribers complained that calls could not get through and even voicemails could not be accessed, with some further angered by Vodafone's problematic services since last year.

Amidst the numerous issues currently arrayed against the telco, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) lauded Vodafone for its quick response to the latest problem.

ACCC spokeswoman Elise Davidson praised the company for its real-time dealing with the problem yesterday though she hoped that the free services deployed by Vodafone to soothe the inconvenience of its clients should have been extended "to voicemail services so customers can retrieve their messages."

Vodafone said that the system glitch yesterday was mainly caused by "a problem with the technology that allows our prepaid customers to apply recharge credit to their accounts."