Telecel Website Taken Offline

The website of the second largest mobile operator, Telecel was taken down this morning. It’s not clear why. We suspect one of two things; either the site’s design and content was now just so outdated it wasn’t doing justice to the name of this fast growing telco, or this could be a security issue,some nasty hacking business. We’ve sent an email of inquiry.

If the first reason is the case (and we hope it is) it wouldn’t have hurt to put some useful info there in addition to the wrongly worded “Telecel Zimbabwe Website is currently under construction”. Maybe a logo for identity purposes and additional text like “You can reach us on the following telephone numbers… and we’re at this physical address.” And maybe some kind of time estimate of how long things will stay like this.

The Telecel website is one of the websites we wrote about last year in an article titled “Zimbabwean Business Should Take Their Internet Image Seriously“.

We’ve also noticed these past couple of weeks that the website of the country’s only news broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings, www.newsnet.co.zw, has been offline. www.zbc.co.zw belonging to the same company used to mirror the Newsnet site but stopped on 29 December 2009. We don’t really care much about our image on the Internet hey…

Update: here’s a response we got from Telecel PR Executive, Francis Chimanda:

We are redoing our website in line with a change in our communication and because of these changes to the design it has become necessary to temporarily put the site on hold. Our site will be up as soon as we complete our work.