Cellphone users in the city had a tough time trying to make calls or send messages on Wednesday afternoon as a major network faced outages for several hours before services were normalised. As part of a sharing agreement between cellphone operators, specific users of other networks too were affected.
The problem started around 1 pm on Wednesday when Airtel users lost connectivity. In a cascading effect, Vodafone 3G network users also faced issues as the network is shared between the companies. Services returned to normal only by evening and data outages were being reported from several areas even then.
Denied the use of their phones, angry users took to Twitter to vent their frustration. Airtel’s Twitter account @airtel_presence said the company was experiencing ‘some congestion’ and that the issue would be resolved at the earliest. There were no further updates. Attempts to contact the company to ascertain the reason for the outage were unsuccessful.
An official spokesperson for Vodafone, however, said that the company’s 2G network had not been affected. “There may have been some downtime on 3G which we are sharing with other operators,” a statement said.