This afternoon i was trying to make some important business calls and couldn't due to a network outage with our cell phone provider. The network went down at around 2.30pm and is still currently unavailable and it is 7pm here now. Just checked the phone is now working and it is 8.30pm.
I have known of outages in the past but those were rectified quickly and did not have much impact on the daily business. Apparently the service went down last week Wednesday during the evening for a few hours and I never even noticed. I think you only realise there is a problem when you want to make a phone call and cannot. They say it is a misconfiguration or a data center's redundant power feed causing the connectivity problems. I am not a technical person, but this story does not sound correct with this outage only being 4 days later and coming on for 5 hours.
I had to revert to making calls with WhatsApp and at least some of my business contacts answered and they fully understood. Some were on other networks and had no clue the biggest network in the country was down.
When you are in the process of setting up a new business each hour does count and I like to follow a set process so these calls will hopefully now be made in the morning. The problem is you spend a good hour trying to find out why your phone is no longer working not knowing everyone else around you on the same network has the same issue. At first I thought maybe the account has not been paid or there is a problem with the sim card and only found out when i got home everyone else had the same connectivity problems.
The map hotspots highlight the areas where Vodacom have outages and these are the major cities in South Africa. This is not a small outage and is widespread so they have a major problem and would rather keep quiet.
It is weird how they try and hide this from their customers instead of actually publicizing they have a problem. There is no word coming from the company and even sites like down detector are covering for them saying there is a minor disruption and try restarting your devices. Surely we all know it is common sense to keep your customers informed as not being open and honest loses you clients immediately.
The bigger the company the bigger the mistakes they seem to make thinking they are too big to fail. The more this happens on a regular basis during business hours you can no longer hide the problems as it affects too many people. The other networks are not going down as one of my clients said today this is why his company moved away from using the Vodacom services or lack of.
I will monitor this going forward as this is no good if we experience any more outages and will move service providers if I have to. Not much seems to work here in SA these days and this is just something you would not expect to happen because your phone is your livelihood on so many levels. We rely on our phones for literally everything and when there is no service you are extremely limited.