ECONET Wireless Zimbabwe has explained the causes of the network challenges that its customers experienced over the past week, saying it was now confident the challenges had now been fully resolved.
“We sincerely regret the challenges that our customers experienced over the past week, which were precipitated by power outages at our National Operations Centre (NOC) in Harare,” Econet’s Chief Operating Officer, Eng Kezito Makuni, said yesterday.
“The power outages, which unfortunately and uncharacteristally occurred twice – last Tuesday afternoon (May 9, 2023) and later in the week on Friday evening (May 12, 2023) – triggered multiple failures on our voice, SMS, EcoCash, mobile data, VAS (third-party value added services) and on our recharge platforms, resulting in customers failing to access these services,” Eng Makuni said.
“The Tuesday downtime, which lasted for about 5 hours, did not affect mobile data services. Unfortunately, when we suffered the second power outage on Friday – which brought down our backup power units – that is when most of our customers struggled to access our mobile data services, with the problem finally being resolved on Monday (May 16, 2023).
“Regrettably, it took our engineers and vendors (equipment suppliers) much longer than anticipated, even as they worked around the clock, to resolve the challenges because it involved replacing some imported, damaged equipment and reconfiguring the nodes to enable resumption of normal service” Eng Makuni said.
“We have since moved to deploy additional backup power and monitoring equipment as well as additional redundancy on our NOC to further reduce the chances of the incidents which took place over the past week from recurring.
“While all our service platforms are now quite stable, we are constantly monitoring their performance, to ensure normal customer experience is maintained,” he said.
Eng Makuni apologised to Econet customers for the challenges experienced over the past week.
“We would like to sincerely apologize to all our valued customers for the inconvenience caused by the technical challenges on our network and we would like to assure all our customers that we do not take our responsibility of facilitating their businesses and relationships through our services lightly,” Eng Makuni said.