DUBAI // Missed job interviews, sick children stuck at school, no data while travelling abroad and potentially missed business calls where some of the complaints du customers raised with the telecoms company after its mobile phone network went down on Sunday.
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 outage. Teachers were trying to call the mum after her child fell 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-year-old 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 in a statement online 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 his roaming data service, which he had paid for while he was in Oman, was not working, with his wife was experiencing similar problems during her trip to the UK.
A Dubai resident, who also spoke to The National via email, said he missed a job interview because of the outage.
“They have no excuse, I pay my bill, they need to pay me a salary now as the interviewer never will,” he said.
By around 3.30pm du announced the problem had been solved and asked customers to restart their handsets and reinsert their SIM cards.
“With regard to the degradation of du mobile services, experienced by some of our customers today, we would like to inform the impacted 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 persists.
American Michael Singer, who runs OpenEye Security and Installations in Dubai, said he was concerned the lack of connection might have cost him business.
“I didn’t notice it at first because I was connected to my WiFi at work, but it was a good couple of hours where I legitimately couldn’t make or receive any calls,” he said. “I think the worst part was that when I made calls for business, I now am not sure if the person was actually busy or if their phone was just not working.”
Mr Singer, 30, said being a small company, OpenEye relies on each and every call.
“When you can’t actually make or receive any calls, it’s impossible to keep up with potential sales,” he said.
As far as compensation, Mr Singer said he was realistic.
“I think we’d all like compensation when something goes wrong, but unless it was maliciously done or purposefully, compensation seems a bit extreme,” he said.
“Technology fails all the time, and then we fix it and move on. No use crying over spilled milk once it’s cleaned up, right?”
dmoukhallati@thenational.ae
*This article has been amended to remove the name of the jobseeker.
