On Monday, August 18, people who used major Indian mobile networks like Airtel, Jio, and Vodafone-Idea had a long network outage. Airtel users in the Delhi-NCR area were the first to report the problems, which then expanded to other big cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru.
Airtel said, “Our customers in Delhi-NCR have been having some problems with voice calls for the past hour or so.” The business also said that “a significant part of the issue has already been resolved” and that engineers were working to fully restore services.
Downdetector, a site that keeps track of computer problems, said that Airtel had more than 3,600 outages at roughly 4:30 p.m., which is a big jump from its normal level of fewer than 15. By 7:55 p.m., the number of reports had dropped to less than 150, and consumers were getting alerts saying that services were being restored.
Airtel subscribers had the most problems during the outage, although Jio and Vodafone-Idea users also had more problems than usual, but not as many. People on social networking sites like X (previously Twitter) complained about not being able to make or receive calls or send messages. The hashtag #AirtelDown was popular.
The most common difficulties that people reported with Airtel on Downdetector were with their phones. Next came problems with their signal and mobile internet. Reports of the outage came in from all over the country, including Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, and Madurai.