At least some 1 million U Mobile subscribers nationwide could be experiencing difficulties to make/receive calls, send SMS and use Internet. U Mobile is facing a network outage nationwide which started since 9PM yesterday(1 Feb).
Unfortunately, calls to U Mobile customer service hotline at 018-3881318 went unanswered. Angry customers turned to social networking site such as Twitter to express their disappointment.
At the point of writing, U Mobile customers would not notice the outage unless they try to make a call or send an SMS. Broadband, Internet and BlackBerry users would be experiencing intermittent connection.
About 1 hours and 45 minutes after the outage occurred, U Mobile posted the following message on its official Twitter account:
“Our 3G services in some areas in Kinta are currently disrupted. Some customers maybe affected. The rectification is in progress. Any inconvenience caused is much regretted. TQ. ^CS02”- Source
And about 20 minutes later it said that the outage was actually nationwide “in some areas”:
Our data services in some areas nationwide are currently having intermittent issue. Some customers maybe affected. The rectification is in progress. Any inconvenience caused is much regretted. TQ. ^CS02- Source
Last checked while this article is being written, no announcement about this outage was posted on its Facebook page despite having over 100 thousand fans. In comparison, U Mobile Twitter account has some 2,000 followers.
MalaysianWireless would like to advice U Mobile customers to roam on Celcom 2G to stay connected with friends & family. Using U Mobile, we experience some drop calls & poor voice quality roaming on Celcom. It did not happened the same when we used a Celcom 2G SIM. We believe that the network roaming agreement between U Mobile & Celcom Axiata does not guarantee the quality of service for U Mobile customers.
This is probably the second major outage U Mobile has had so far and the 1st major network outage in the year 2012. It faced a similar network problem back in October where the outage lasted about 5 hours during business hours. U Mobile CEO later said “Today we let you down and I would like to apologise for the service interruption you have experienced,”. However no detailed explanation was given for the network failure. MalaysianWireless believes that the previous network outage was caused by an error in HLR (Home Location Register).
For that outage, U Mobile compensated customer with free unlimited SMS and 1.5GB of data. We will update more details here on the current network outage as we find out more.
[Update 1, Feb [email protected]]- U Mobile Network was restored at 1.05AM. Voice, SMS & Data appeared to be working again. This means that the outage lasted for at least 4 hours. We will try to find out what caused the outage soon.
