Econet – full statement on power failures that caused network challenges

We discussed that Econet’s recent outage was caused by multiple power failures at their network operations centre. Here is their full statement on what happened.

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. 

The power outages, which unfortunately and uncharacteristically 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.

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 this week.

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.

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.

We would like to sincerely apologise 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.

They say their platforms are now stable and are telling users on social media to, “Kindly note that the network challenge was restored. Please confirm if you are still facing any challenges.” So, the worst is behind us apparently.

However, do note that this does not mean those other challenges that they have been facing have been resolved. I’m talking mostly about the power cuts in the country that necessitate the running of base stations on diesel power. That problem remains.

As long as it remains you will get terrible service in some areas when there is no electricity as Econet cannot run generators at every single base station for multiple hours a day.

The lack of forex issue which makes it hard for Econet to keep up with maintenance schedules on their equipment also remains. So, some of the base stations out there are in dire need of repair and so will not work as they should.

That’s the amount of slack we can cut them.

Essentially, all we are saying is that Econet says we are back to where we were two weeks ago. Which was not the best of places to be but is better than what we were experiencing these past 8 days.

Be advised accordingly, do not expect to all of sudden get better service than you were getting pre-outage. Expect more of the same until something else changes.

Also read:

8 days later, Econet data connectivity challenges persist – a timeline of their comms on the issue.

Econet – multiple power failures at network operations centre to blame for outage