Men walk past a Vodafone-Qatar Telecommunication office in Doha, October 22, 2009 (Reuters / Fadi Al-Assaad)
With the help of “global network experts”, Vodafone Qatar last night succeeded in partially fixing two-day service outage and also announced compensation package for its customers.
“Our engineers are on-site all night again and we will be conducting critical stabilisation work to ensure the network is reliably restored,” Vodafone tweeted after restoration of network which was facing blackout since Monday morning.
Vodafone continued struggling to fix technical issue to end service outage the second day while the large number of customers were seen at Ooredoo outlets across the country to subscribe new service.
“Today I subscribed an Ooredoo mobile connection as it had become impossible for me to continue my job as a cab driver,” said Hassan, an expat working with a private limousine service.
Earlier in the morning on the second consecutive day of outage, Vodafone Qatar said in a statement that their 2G network had been partially restored in some areas.
“Our 2G network has been partially restored allowing customers to now make calls in some areas to other Vodafone numbers and international numbers. Customers need to manually select our 2G network in settings,” they tweeted. But, the customers kept on complaining that they were facing troubles with the network in some areas.
In a video message Ian Gray, CEO of Vodafone Qatar also apologised to the customers for the outage and assured that the services would be restored soon after fixing the technical glitch.
In a separate statement, telecom operator said: “The Vodafone Qatar team has been working tirelessly through the night to resolve the technical issue triggered by a routine upgrade as part of our network modernization programme.”
“We have made progress on restoring 2G voice services and now the focus of our entire team is on restoring full connectivity across our network with the aid of global network experts who have arrived in Qatar this morning,” said in a statement issued by Vodafone Qatar.
It added: “As part of the compensation, all balances that expired last night will be returned to customers in full with a new expiry date of 28 July 2017. Moreover balances scheduled to expire in the next 10 days will have their expiry date extended so they remain valid until 28 July 2017.”
“Yes, services are now restored but the company will have to do a lot to restore the shaken trust of its customers,” said Saim, a Vodafone customer after restoration of network.
