Egyptian authorities said Monday they had fined the national branch of mobile phone giant Vodafone 500,000 euros over a coverage outage last week just ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday.

The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) said it made the „unprecedented“ move after services dropped „for several hours, in multiple regions“ on June 3 just before the holiday which marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.