• Airtel Outage Continues

    Airtel Outage Continues

    Nachiket 'therapist' Mhatre, Dec 29, 2011 1858 hrs IST

    Will need one more day for voice and data services to "start normalizing". Updated.

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Update (30-Dec-2011): Airtel voice services have been on the blink for four days on the trot now. However, GPRS and SMS services are working relatively trouble-free. Looking at the bright side though, Airtel users won't be obligated to send New Year's wishes anymore. That's a lot of money saved.


In a rerun of the 2008 incident, Airtel's data centre in Malad caught fire early Tuesday morning - nuking its voice and data services in the western region (Mumbai, Maharashtra, Goa, and Madhya Pradesh). Unlike the 2008 outage, which lasted for 12 hours, this fire safety fiasco has been going on for three days now. The very literal network meltdown has affected data services such as 3G, GPRS, CDMA, and broadband internet access, in addition to voice calling. While some users can now intermittently access GPRS services and send SMS, making and receiving calls is a hit-and-miss affair for many users.

Airtel, however, attempts to portray a rosier picture. "Our teams have been working round the clock to restore these services, and we are happy to state that all mobile, DSL and mobile data services have largely been normalized. However, some customers may be facing intermittent network congestion during the network stabilization process. We are working on our Enterprise Services delivery which will start normalizing tomorrow", said an Airtel spokesperson.

When you take off the sugar coating, this still means there's at least one more day of suffering left before the situation can get any better. Three days of flaky voice and data connection in a network circle accounting for 17% of Airtel's 175 million strong user base is unacceptable. Then again, so is the propensity of Airtel's data centres to burst into flames time and again.


Airtel Outage Still Going Strong


That just might be true since it took six hours to control the relatively minor fire.


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Discussion Board
(4) Comments
Krunal Meher
,Mumbai, on Dec 30, 2011 10:11 PM
Its been three days and i m still not able to call and use internet and i know many of my friends are having same problem. When airtel says that "some customers may be facing intermittent network congestion" i think it is other way around. I hope they will lose some customers due to this fiasco. It shows that they don't have disaster recovery system in place and they definitely don't care about their customer. Not a good way to EXPRESS YOURSELF AIRTEL............
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anonymous
,delhi, on Dec 31, 2011 12:02 PM
u r right. airtel used to be best service provider a until a few years ago. Now it is among the worst. Many ppl, including me r facing big time network problem with airtel mobile even in delhi & airtel is least bothered. u just lodge ur complaint & no one gets back to attend to it. tried multiple times n finally ported my number to some other service. u wont believe it, but the sarkari company (mtnl) attends to customer complaints better.
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naveenchaudhary
,meerut, on Dec 29, 2011 10:54 PM
LOL@ Fair usage policy.. a memorable statement
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Aditya
,Bangalore, on Dec 29, 2011 09:15 PM
Whatever happened to "Business continuity and disaster recovery"!! YOU broadband it is..at least wont be paying as much
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