On Monday morning, 23 Elul, it was close to 24 hours for some Pelephone users. They were angrily awaiting a restoration of service as well as an explanation for the prolonged interruption in service.

Pelephone reported Monday morning that intensive operations continued throughout the night, during which service was restored to most customers, while those who remained disconnected are part of the company’s subscribers whose numbers begin with numbers 6 and 7. As early as noon, cellular service began to operate again for hundreds of thousands of customers who were disconnected, and at the peak of the outage, more than half a million users were without service.

Pelephone added “work has been completed to deal with subscribers who experienced service disruptions yesterday, while the company continues to monitor the network and deal with specific cases of unavailability.

“Yesterday, the malfunction prevented hundreds of thousands of subscribers from receiving calls and even disrupted Internet surfing throughout the country. This is a second mishap within four days, after last Thursday there were problems of communication among a smaller number of subscribers. Yesterday, on the first day of returning to school, when concerned parents wanted to talk to their children, about 20 percent of Pelephone subscribers, which has about 2.6 million subscribers, were affected by the problem.

Although the malfunction began around noon, Pelephone officials had difficulty explaining what was going on until the late afternoon hours on Sunday. In the afternoon, Pelephone announced that the source of the disruptions was upgrade and maintenance work on the network’s data base. At about 4:00PM, Pelephone announced a significant improvement in the service, and that the disruptions were focused on the figures starting in the numbers 6 and 7.

The disruption of the cellular network is a crisis, as well as stressful and a particularly difficult time for cellular companies, especially at the technological center and customer service. The problems in the Pelephone network also caused panic among subscribers of other companies, who were unsuccessful when trying to call Pelephone subscribers and thought that the problem was at their end. Against this backdrop, customers of all the cellular companies recorded extensive calls to call centers. However, despite the deep competition in the cellular market, it is noted by the experts that such outages do not usually result in subscribers moving to a different cellular provider, which is relatively easy to do in Israel.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)