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Zimbabwe’s biggest mobile network operator Econet Wireless Zimbabwe which has been facing network outages has finally made a public statement on the developments that left millions disconnected.
Econet said hat the serious challenges were caused by power outages which which were triggered twice at their National Operations Centre (NOC) in Harare affecting their voice, SMS, EcoCash, mobile data, VAS
The mobile network operators said they have now invested in additional backup power and monitoring equipment as well as additional redundancy on their NOC to further reduce the chances of the incidents which took place over the past week from recurring.
We sincerely regret the challenges that our customers experienced over the past week, which were precipitated by power outages at our National Operations Centre (NOC) in Harare.
The power outages, which unfortunately and uncharacteristically occurred twice – last Tuesday afternoon (May 9, 2023) and later in the week on Friday evening (May 12, 2023) – triggered multiple failures on our voice, SMS, EcoCash, mobile data, VAS (third-party value-added services) and on our recharge platforms, resulting in customers failing to access these services.
The Tuesday downtime, which lasted for about 5 hours, did not affect mobile data services. Unfortunately, when we suffered the second power outage on Friday – which brought down our backup power units – that is when most of our customers struggled to access our mobile data services, with the problem finally being resolved on Monday this week.
Regrettably, it took our engineers and vendors (equipment suppliers) much longer than anticipated, even as they worked around the clock, to resolve the challenges because it involved replacing some imported, damaged equipment and reconfiguring the nodes to enable resumption of normal service.
We have since moved to deploy additional backup power and monitoring equipment as well as additional redundancy on our NOC to further reduce the chances of the incidents which took place over the past week from recurring.
While all our service platforms are now quite stable, we are constantly monitoring their performance, to ensure normal customer experience is maintained.
We would like to sincerely apologise to all our valued customers for the inconvenience caused by the technical challenges on our network and we would like to assure all our customers that we do not take our responsibility of facilitating their businesses and relationships through our services lightly.
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