Airtel won't tell why its network went down

BANGALORE, INDIA: Though thousands of Bharti Airtel customers in the National Capital Region (NCR) had to suffer for couple of hours on Thursday evening as the cellular network went down, the operator, who has rectified the problem ever since, was not forthcoming to tell what made their network down.

Bharti Airtel has only attributed the reason for network downtime to a "technical snag".

According to TRAI data, the telecom service provider has about 7.98 million subscribers in Delhi as on March 31, 2011.

“An unforeseen technical outage had affected services on some of our circuits. As a result, some Airtel Delhi Mobile customers have experienced connectivity issues. The network is up now. We deeply regret the inconvenience,” a message sent out by Bharti Airtel said.

Thousands of Airtel subscribers in Delhi and NCR were left read-faced on Thursday as their cell phones stopped working abruptly. Subscribers, especially in Central and East Delhi, were reported to be most affected.

Customers tweet displeasure

Many customers had expressed their displeasure with the operators by tweeting messages.

Airtel corporate communications executive would only state that "we wouldn't be able to provide any further details other than the reasons already attributed. The network is up now, any further statements would only create confusions."

No one wants to talk about bad news, especially when the weak financial performance has already put the telecom services major in a tight spot.

The executive also clarified that only mobile services were affected in parts of Delhi region and no other services were affected.