KDDI finally restores mobile service after 86-hour failure

Jul 05 (Nikkei) - KDDI Corp. said its "au" mobile phone service had been fully restored by Tuesday afternoon, ending 86 hours of service disruptions that affected millions of customers and a range of business activities.

But the company's woes were far from over amid mounting criticism of its handling of the unusually long network disruption, including from the regulator, while affected customers called for proper compensation.

The company said the previous day that voice calls and data communications had almost been restored nationwide after the disruption that commenced in the early hours of Saturday.

The service outage affected up to 39.15 million mobile connections, disrupting banking systems, the transmission of weather data, parcel deliveries and network-connected cars, among other things.

Earlier Tuesday, Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Yasushi Kaneko criticized KDDI for its handling of the disruption, saying the mobile operator failed to provide sufficient information to customers in a timely manner.

The network failure occurred when a router for voice calls was replaced during regular maintenance, with repair work triggering a concentration of traffic that led the company to reduce user access.

During that time, the carrier experienced a cascade of technical problems that further prolonged the connection difficulties. ...continue reading

Source: ANNnewsCH

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