Celcom Axiata acknowledged a major network interruption disruption yesterday and the Telco is apologising to its customers for the outage. The Telco said in a statement this morning that the interruption happened due to an upgrade exercise which failed. This caused an outage for several hours, beginning from 7am. The upgrade exercise was planned to double up customer data capacity from 60Gbps to 100Gbps.
In the media statement, it said “Celcom would like to apologise to its postpaid and prepaid customers, for the inconvenience caused related to data and voice interruptions, as they were unable to place calls and access internet data specifically, on 2G and 3G networks.”
MalaysianWireless received several reports yesterday morning from readers who claimed to experience the outage. Some readers said there were no network on their phone while most people said voice and Internet wasn’t working. The network outage may have affected all Celcom customers nationwide.
Azwan Khan Osman Khan, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Business Operations said during this unfortunate situation, the company discovered some gaps which were immediately fixed.
“We regret this inconvenience from the bottom of our hearts and we hope our customers will continue to support us.
“We apologise that the system upgrade today was not as seamless as anticipated, however, our technical teams had restored the system to a normal state as at 2.00pm on the same day nationwide,” he said.
Azwan noted that the technical glitches were detected as Celcom was conducting upgrades to migrate from 60Gbps to 100Gbps on its technology partner’s platform.
The migration had encountered serious engineering challenges with a sudden surge of traffic outflow, resulting in a severe congestion to some of Celcom’s nodes in Subang HiTech and Kepong.
“We understand how critical it is that we deliver seamless connectivity to support our customers’ mobile communication needs, and will increase our efforts to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations,” he said, adding that Celcom was always on the move to deliver the best digital experience to its customers.
As of Quarter 1, 2017, Celcom Axiata has 10.25 million mobile subscribers. There are 7.3 million subscribers and 2.95 million postpaid subscribers. Some 63.1% Celcom subscribers are data users, consuming an average 5GB a month. About 77% of its subscribers are smartphone users.
