If you were one of those son and daughter who wanted to call and wish your Father, “Happy Fathers Day” last night, you may not be able to do so especially if you or your father is on the Maxis network.
Maxis, the leading and the fastest mobile network operator in the country experienced a major voice outage since 4.50 pm yesterday. Below is one of the statement that the company issued at 11.50pm last night:
“Maxis Customers may be facing some difficulties in making /receiving calls. SMS and Internet services are ok. Affected areas are Petaling Jaya, Petaling, Bandar Baru Sg Besi, Pekan Salak Selatan, Damansara, Klang, Dengkil, Kajang, Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, Semenyih, Ulu Kelang, Cheras, Dengkil, Kajang, Hulu Teriang, Part of Melaka, Negeri Sembilan, Part of Pahang. We are working towards resolving this and would like to apologise for the inconvenience. Thank you.”
The outage resulted angry and disappointed Maxis subscribers, leading to thousands of comment against the carrier on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Below are some screenshot taken from the Maxis Facebook page itself.
Full screenshot in JPG can be viewed here & here.
MalaysianWireless tracked the Maxis Voice service outage, started at 4.50pm(15 June 2013) and restored after 10am(16 June 2013), that’s almost 17 hours of downtime!
Maxis issued an updated statement today and stated that FREE SMS will be given to all Maxis subscribers:
We apologise to our customers who have experienced difficulty in making or receiving calls in the Klang Valley and extended surrounding areas. Our engineers responded to a technical incident at 4:50pm on 15/6 and have worked around-the-clock to restore the service. We were able to isolate the fault and the voice service has been restored. Our SMS and internet services were not affected.
In view of the inconvenience caused and whilst we continue to monitor the performance of the network, Maxis will offer all its customers, FREE DOMESTIC SMS service from 6:00pm on 16/6 until 11:59pm on 17/6. Once again, we apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank our customers for their understanding and patience.
While it is nice for the mobile operator to offer Free SMS as compensation, I am not sure how this would benefit or make all subscribers happy.
Whats Maxis should have done in my opinion:
- Free voice minutes for Heavy Voice Call Users: Maxis should have at least compensated voice plan subscribers with free voice credit/minutes, especially TalkPlan users. Not to forget those who are using Value Plus, Value First, Standard Plan and Hotlink users with heavy voice usage track record. The only type of subscribers that would benefit from these FREE SMS would be Maxis TextMore users and a large number of Hotlink users. But what about heavy voice call subscribers and those affected by the voice outage, will these FREE SMS make them happy?
- SMS Notification regarding the outage: Maxis could have updated customers on the network restoration progress, tell customers that they are rectifying the issue. Instead Maxis uses the SMS system for promotional blasting. Yes, Maxis kept their Facebook page updated, but the page has 700k fans while Maxis has 13 million subscribers!
- No Notification on Maxis Website: The Maxis website was recently revamped by the customer service team. However an important section is missing on the Maxis website, there is no announcement page. Perhaps its time to focus on customers instead of sales & promotion?
One operator that does a good job during network outage is P1. I am not saying P1 is better but the ISP has in the past and still, compensated customers by waiving part of the monthly access fee. They also has a SMS system in place to notify customers when the network is down and restored.
People always complained that Maxis services are expensive, however I’ve always said that Maxis offers a premium service and there is a price to that. After today, I don’t think I would be saying the same thing again. Lots of good people has left Maxis thanks to the recent restructuring, I just hope that the Maxis shareholders are doing the right thing.
