Du downtime riles customers

Job interviews and school calls hit by mobile glitch

DUBAI // Missed job interviews, sick children stuck at school, no data while travelling abroad and potentially missed business calls were some of the complaints du customers raised with the telecoms company after its mobile phone network went down yesterday.

Residents and businesses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi noticed a lack of phone service or internet connection on their mobiles early in the morning. The problem was resolved by evening.

Customers’ landlines and WiFi connections were unaffected.

Staff at Nida Samir’s daughter’s school were unable to reach her for hours during the-disruption. Teachers were trying to call the mother after her child became ill in class.

“I am so frustrated because the school was trying to call me and my husband was trying to call me to pick up our nine-yearold daughter who was vomiting in school,” she said, adding that she had been without service for at least seven hours.

“My phone is still not working [ at 5pm], and I have tried restarting three times,” said the 38-year-old Pakistani. “It worked briefly, enough to receive two messages and then stopped.”

Ms Samir said the school was finally able to reach her on her landline.

“I had to take my child to the hospital to get checked, and I still can’t use my GPS. I think there should be some kind of compensation.”

Du confirmed there was a problem earlier in the day, saying that “some of our mobile customers may be experiencing temporary issues with their mobile lines”. The company asked customers to be patient while it worked to resolve the issue.

However, after failing to get answers on the company’s customer service number, people turned to social media sites like Twitter to voice their frustrations.

James Jervis said via email that his roaming data service, which he had paid for while he was in Oman, was not working, and his wife was experiencing similar problems during her trip to Britain.

Oliver Bickell said he missed a job interview because of the situation.

“They have no excuse. I pay my bill, they need to pay me a salary now as the interviewer never will,” he said. By about 3.30pm du announced the problem had been solved and asked customers to restart their handsets and reinsert Sim cards.

“With regard to the degradation of du mobile services, experienced by some of our customers today, we would like to inform the affected customers that all mobile services have now been restored. We identified the root cause and our technical teams responded swiftly to resolve it.” The company has asked its customers to contact them in case the problem persisted.