Vodafone has confirmed that its network outage in the UK earlier this week was caused by a "non-malicious software issue."

The outage on Monday (October 13) affected Vodafone's mobile and home broadband network for several hours across the country.

More than 135,000 Vodafone customers had reported disruption by 3.20pm on Monday, according to Downdetector.

Following the outage, Vodafone provided an update as to what caused the issue, citing a non-malicious software issue.

"On Monday afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G, and 5G services," said a Vodafone spokesperson.

"This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners, which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers."

The outage appeared to mostly impact customers who have Vodafone broadband services at their homes, although a quarter of the reported incidents related to mobile Internet access. A smaller percentage of users reported not being able to make phone calls.

Vodafone completed its merger with Three UK earlier this year in a deal worth £15 billion ($20.16bn). The telcos are currently working to integrate their networks.