Customers who bought voice or data bundles and watched them expire while MTN Uganda’s network was down will get that value back. Chief Executive Sylvia Mulinge made the pledge in a statement on July 7.
“To every customer who was affected we sincerely apologize,” Mulinge said. She said the leadership and management team had decided the day before to compensate everyone “whose balances on their voice and data expired because they were not able to use it during the outage.” The company said payouts will follow its customer care processes once services are fully restored.
Midday failure
Trouble started around midday and spread from about 1 p.m. Subscribers could not make or receive calls, get online or complete Mobile Money transactions. The disruption reached customers in several parts of Uganda and lasted hours before services came back gradually.
MTN’s first public statement blamed “a major power outage at one of our data centres” that left “a segment of our customers” without voice, data and MoMo services. The company said its technical teams were working to restore everything as quickly as possible and thanked customers for their patience.
Not a cyberattack
Mulinge ruled out a security breach. “The interruption was caused by a power disruption at one of our data centres. It was not a cybersecurity incident,” she said. “Customer data remained secure, Mobile Money balances remained safe, and all services have been fully restored.”
She told customers that no personal information or mobile money funds were compromised.
