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MTN reconnects majority of users

By Matshelane Mamabolo
Johannesburg, 16 Feb 2016
MTN says its engineers are working to resolve intermittent connection issues on the network.
MTN says its engineers are working to resolve intermittent connection issues on the network.

MTN says the majority of the one million South African subscribers hit by network downtime have now had their connections fully restored.

MTN South Africa's Twitter account this morning posted a tweet to customers saying "the network is currently operating normally, but we continue to monitor it closely. Thank you for your continued patience".

Earlier today, however, MTN executive for group corporate affairs, Chris Maroleng, told ITWeb Africa that the company was still working to get around 100 000 users back online.

This after the mobile operator put out a statement on Monday saying that one million voice, SMS and data customers were experiencing intermittent connection issues. MTN customers had been complaining about connection issues since Sunday, 14 February.

"On Sunday about a million of our users were affected by the downtime and what has happened so far is that we are in the process of restoring the service for the vast majority of those people. We are now dealing with getting back online about a hundred thousand people as I speak to you now, and we anticipate that maybe later on today we should have resolved the issue," according to Maroleng.

He says MTN cannot at present explain what caused the widespread downtime.

"Our engineers are still looking into the matter and will provide us with a full report as soon as they have established what was the exact problem that led to downtime on our network".

He says the investigation at this moment is focused on trying to establish the root cause of the problem and to ensure that MTN does not have a similar problem in future. Once that happens, the company will be "in a position to look into the other impacts of the downtime".

Maroleng would not disclose how many engineers MTN has assigned to resolving the network problems or from which locations they were working to resolve the issues.