Mobile operator Vodacom (VOD) said late on Thursday that subscribers affected by a network outage “should now see their service being restored,” following an overall degradation of service for most of the afternoon.
Shortly after midday, the group apologised via Twitter that “certain customers” were having difficulties calling or SMSing on its network.
The group tweeted: “We're aware that certain customers are experiencing an inability to call or SMS. Sincere apologies, we're working on a fix.”
It also used the social networking platform to deny that its network outage was related to the Regulation of Interception of Communication Act (RICA) deadline later today.
“The engineers are still working on the network outage - apologies to everyone affected. Just to confirm, this is not related to RICA,” it said.
The group said the cause of the outage, which affected subscribers in selected spots across the country, was a multiple failure of transmission system equipment. This transmission system, it added, provided the connectivity to support the wireless network. The transmission failure, which occurred late this morning, had a knock-on effect on other areas of the network. This resulted in an overall degradation of service, Vodacom said.
Speaking about the outage, chief technical officer Andries Delport said: We're currently working flat out to get service restored to all customers as quickly as possible. We expect that network congestion could persist into this evening but are confident that it will subside quickly. From here we will be running a full investigation into the cause of the failure and more importantly how we can further improve network redundancy. We apologise to every customer who has been affected. What happened today was not acceptable and we will make sure that we do everything possible to avoid a recurrence.
Discussing the overall plans for the network, Delport added: “We are spending more than six billion rand on our network in SA this year to improve our service to all customers. We will be increasing the number of 3G base stations and adding significantly to our own transmission network capacity.
On Wednesday, the group had confirmed that it was having trouble with its network.
“We can confirm that a small percentage of our customers have experienced a delay in using our USSD recharge system. The airtime has been credited but in some cases it is not yet reflecting on the individual's balance. We would like to apologise to any affected customers and assure them that their recharge will be visible on their account shortly,” Richard Boorman, Vodacom's Executive Head of Media Relations told I-Net Bridge. - I-Net Bridge