CHENNAI: Dissatisfied Aircel customers protested in large numbers in front of the telecom service provider’s office at Washermenpet here on Wednesday evening. This came days after news of Aircel looking to file bankruptcy with the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) broke out.
Customers have been in a flurry to port out of the telecom service provider, but have been unable to do so due to poor connectivity and service.
“My friend has not been able to receive calls for the last two days,” said a protestor, M Rizwan. “We all went as a group to ask the Aircel people and protest, but police chased us away.”
Twitter too was full of Aircel customers taking to the social media platform in a desperate bid to port out of the telecom provider or merely to vent out their frustration.
One of the primary reasons why people are getting extremely anxious is because everything is linked to the mobile phone number - be it the bank account, Aadhaar card, gas and so on. “Due to Aircel network issue, I am facing a lot of problems like getting the One Time Password (OTP), banking, wallets and call,” said Twitter user, Deepak Chandran.
Mobile numbers being linked to bank accounts was among the important reasons why customers demanded that the issue be resolved at the earliest.
“My Aircel number has not been working from yesterday,” said B Ranjith on Twitter.”Lot of important things associated with this number, can’t do anything now.” This situation was not prevalent only in Chennai, but across the State.
“If you can’t give a network without signal breakage, give the network to some other operator,” said one user, Hariharan. “We (the customers) are done with your network.” Police were posted at the office to maintain law and order. Even traffic was affected.
“They were forming a crowd and affecting traffic. So we persuaded them to disperse,” said Inspector Jawahar in Washermenpet. The protests went on for about an hour from 3.30 pm.
In an attempt to provide relief to customers, the official Aircel Twitter handle said, “Please be informed that we are not at all closing our services. Also, we value our customers and will update all of you in advance if any such thing happens. However, there is some technical issue going on at your location which our team is working on to get the same rectified ASAP.”