MTC battling software bug
Frank Steffen
Members of the public have been complaining about making payments to mobile operator MTC without their accounts being credited since 2 January. During telephonic inquiries and in person, customers were informed that the company's computer programme had crashed and that the IT department was busy restoring the systems.
Fikameni Mathias, corporate communications officer of MTC, admitted on Monday in an interview with an NMH publication that there have been significant problems since the beginning of the year.
“This is not a so-called crash. We were surprised by a normal system update. Just like any other company or your PC at home, our system needs to be updated from time to time. But this time, a lot went wrong when we uploaded the latest software version of our main programme. This caused other programmes to be denied access and so they failed one by one. We are only now approaching the end of this problem."
Unfortunately, the system failed to such an extent that MTC had to reset the entire programme, relying on existing data back-ups and copies, said Mathias.
He added that members of the public should not assume that MTC did not want to assist its customers during this time.
“You cannot imagine what was going on in our customer service centre when this problem raised its head, with 500 or more customers calling at any time. It was to be expected that huge queues formed in our telephone service system. Often the disgruntled customers were understandably not interested in our explanation by the time we were able to take their calls. Initially, we planned to assist each customer individually until we realised that the problem was simply becoming too big. We had to revert to the data back-ups."
Asked about the cost implications for some customers, Mathias said once the system has become fully functional again, it will be subject to management’s discretion to take a decision to reimburse customers for costs or damages, if any.
He acknowledged that there will likely be customers who paid for additional data and are now faced with a depleted account because the data had not been credited to their account. This would likely have resulted in data consumption being charged at a normal telephone fee, which is much more expensive.
“I cannot tell you how this will be solved. I am just glad that the problems have diminished since Saturday afternoon and I'm currently waiting for confirmation that the network is 100% working again,” Mathias said.
All payments and purchases of data as well as transactions to convert airtime to data were affected by the outage.
Members of the public have been complaining about making payments to mobile operator MTC without their accounts being credited since 2 January. During telephonic inquiries and in person, customers were informed that the company's computer programme had crashed and that the IT department was busy restoring the systems.
Fikameni Mathias, corporate communications officer of MTC, admitted on Monday in an interview with an NMH publication that there have been significant problems since the beginning of the year.
“This is not a so-called crash. We were surprised by a normal system update. Just like any other company or your PC at home, our system needs to be updated from time to time. But this time, a lot went wrong when we uploaded the latest software version of our main programme. This caused other programmes to be denied access and so they failed one by one. We are only now approaching the end of this problem."
Unfortunately, the system failed to such an extent that MTC had to reset the entire programme, relying on existing data back-ups and copies, said Mathias.
He added that members of the public should not assume that MTC did not want to assist its customers during this time.
“You cannot imagine what was going on in our customer service centre when this problem raised its head, with 500 or more customers calling at any time. It was to be expected that huge queues formed in our telephone service system. Often the disgruntled customers were understandably not interested in our explanation by the time we were able to take their calls. Initially, we planned to assist each customer individually until we realised that the problem was simply becoming too big. We had to revert to the data back-ups."
Asked about the cost implications for some customers, Mathias said once the system has become fully functional again, it will be subject to management’s discretion to take a decision to reimburse customers for costs or damages, if any.
He acknowledged that there will likely be customers who paid for additional data and are now faced with a depleted account because the data had not been credited to their account. This would likely have resulted in data consumption being charged at a normal telephone fee, which is much more expensive.
“I cannot tell you how this will be solved. I am just glad that the problems have diminished since Saturday afternoon and I'm currently waiting for confirmation that the network is 100% working again,” Mathias said.
All payments and purchases of data as well as transactions to convert airtime to data were affected by the outage.
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