A fire that happened at its Malad data center in Mumbai has left lakhs of Airtel customers reeling under either no network coverage, SMS’ or data access. The fire reportedly happened in the wee hours of December 27 and lakhs of Airtel users woke up to a chaotic morning.
Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook were filled with posts related to the outage and Airtel on its part did make some attempts to address customer concerns. At the time of writing this piece late at night, the network is still not up for many users – including yours truly.
Amongst the problems that users faced, most were related to data connectivity with the company’s EDGE and 3G networking failing. Voice services were active at least in my case. I had a hard time getting through to other Airtel numbers though. SMS was another issue. Some others I hear lost complete network coverage. There were unconfirmed reports of Airtel Broadband customers too being affected although some reported that their services were back up by evening.
Airtel’s last significant outage happened back in 2008 when a fire destroyed its data center at Worli – once again causing almost its entire western region affected badly. In that case, it took Airtel almost a month to resume normal operations.
Airtel on its part did send a text message to its users informing about a “Connectivity issue” saying that they will get back to us once the issue is resolved. Oh and in the screenshot below you might see that the EDGE connectivity is working. Let me inform you that this screenshot was captured later when I was using an Idea SIM.
Anyway, we hope the issue is sorted as soon as possible. Also, with two fire related outages happening in a span of three years, Airtel might just want to improve their backup and contingency plans.
