On Saturday 29 August 2026, Vodafone broadband went down across the country for several hours — Downdetector logged more than 31,000 reports, and houses here in the estate were among them. Vodafone confirmed the interruption at the time and said services were back to normal by the Sunday morning.
The frustrating part is that for most people the fibre line itself never stopped working. The thing that broke was DNS, and if your Gigabox was using Vodafone's own DNS servers — which it does out of the box — your internet looked completely dead even though the connection was sitting there fine.
This guide explains what that means in plain terms, and walks through the five-minute change you can make on the Gigabox so that a repeat of the same failure doesn't take your house offline.
What DNS actually is
DNS is the internet's phone book. Every website really lives at a number (an IP address),
but nobody wants to remember 104.18.12.7, so you type hawksbaywicklow.com and your modem
quietly asks a DNS server "what's the number for this name?" before connecting.
Your modem doesn't run that phone book itself — it asks one belonging to your provider. So when Vodafone's DNS servers stopped answering, every device in the house was still perfectly connected to the internet, but couldn't look up the number for a single website. Pages fail, apps spin, and it's indistinguishable from the line being down.
The fix is to tell the Gigabox to use a different phone book — one run by somebody other than Vodafone. There are several free, well-known public ones, they're generally faster than provider DNS anyway, and if Vodafone's has another bad day you won't notice.
This doesn't change your provider, your plan or your speed, and it's not a workaround for a genuinely broken line. If the fibre itself is cut, no DNS setting will help — but that wasn't what happened in August.
Which DNS to use
Any one of these three is a solid choice. Pick one row and use both of its addresses.
| Provider | Primary DNS | Secondary DNS | Why you'd pick it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 1.1.1.1 | 1.0.0.1 | Fastest for most people, and doesn't log what you look up |
| Google Public DNS | 8.8.8.8 | 8.8.4.4 | The best-known one; extremely reliable |
| Quad9 | 9.9.9.9 | 149.112.112.112 | Blocks known malware and scam sites automatically |
The screenshots below use Cloudflare (1.1.1.1 / 1.0.0.1), which is what most people here
have gone with. If you'd rather have a bit of built-in protection against dodgy sites — handy
on a family network — Quad9 is worth the swap.
Setting it on the Gigabox, step by step
You'll need to be at home and connected to your own Wi-Fi (or plugged in by cable) — the settings page is only reachable from inside the house.
1. Open the Gigabox settings page
In any web browser, type 192.168.1.1 into the address bar and press Enter. You'll get a
login box asking for a password.
The password is printed on the sticker on the back or underneath the Gigabox — look for something labelled "Web interface password", "Router password" or "Admin password". It is not your Wi-Fi password unless you've changed it to match, and it's not your Vodafone account login either.
2. Switch to Expert Mode
By default the page opens in Basic Mode, which hides the DNS settings entirely. In the top-right corner there's a dropdown — click it and choose Expert Mode.
The menu across the top will expand to show more tabs once you do.
3. Go to Internet → DNS
Click Internet in the red menu bar, then DNS in the list down the left-hand side.
4. Set it to "manually" and type the addresses in
On the DNS page, Secure DNS is set to automatically — that's the setting that hands control to Vodafone. Click manually instead.
Make sure "Configure the DNS for all devices" is switched on. That's the toggle that makes this apply to everything in the house — phones, laptops, TVs, the lot — rather than you having to change each device individually.
Then fill in the four boxes for the Domain Name Server (DNS) Address with your primary
choice, and the Secondary DNS Address boxes with the backup. Each box takes one part of
the address: 1, 1, 1, 1 on the top row and 1, 0, 0, 1 on the second.
5. Save, then restart the box
Scroll down and click Save (or Apply). Then switch the Gigabox off at the wall, wait ten seconds and switch it back on. Devices in the house pick up the new setting when they reconnect — a phone that's slow to notice just needs its Wi-Fi turned off and on again.
To check it worked, browse a few sites as normal. If everything loads, you're done.
If you have your own router instead of the Gigabox
Plenty of houses here run a mesh system or a better router behind the Gigabox. If yours is doing the routing job, that's where the DNS setting needs to go instead — look for DNS under WAN, Internet or Advanced settings in its app, and enter the same addresses. Setting it on the Gigabox alone won't necessarily reach devices connected to the mesh.
Undoing it
If you ever want to go back — a support call where Vodafone asks you to, or you just want the default behaviour — return to Internet → DNS in Expert Mode and set Secure DNS back to automatically. Nothing else needs changing.
A few practical tips
- Do this now, not during the next outage. The whole point is that the change is already in place when Vodafone's DNS falls over. Trying to look up how to fix it while your internet is down is a miserable experience.
- Write the Gigabox password somewhere. If yours has been changed and nobody remembers it, the reset pinhole on the back restores the sticker password — but it also wipes your Wi-Fi name and password, so everything in the house has to be reconnected.
- Same trick works on a phone. If you're stuck offline and can't get to the modem, most
phones let you set a private DNS directly (Android: Settings → Network → Private DNS →
one.one.one.one; iPhone: install the free 1.1.1.1 app). Useful as an emergency measure. - It won't fix slow Wi-Fi. DNS affects whether pages resolve, not how fast they download — if things are sluggish rather than dead, the Wi-Fi guide is the one you want.
- Consider it whoever your provider is. Sky, Pure Telecom and Digiweb customers can do exactly the same thing on their own boxes; only the menus differ. See the broadband options guide for who's who.
Compiled from publicly available Vodafone and news reporting, plus resident experience — not an endorsement of any particular company. If you spot outdated details here, let a committee member know so we can update this page.