DTAC told to compensate for service disruption

The watchdog called in DTAC in the afternoon to give it the order after the company held an urgent news conference in the morning to explain the technical error. DTAC said it would show responsibility by offering airtime credit to customers who made calls or short messages from midnight on Tuesday to midnight yesterday. 

DTAC must explain to the NBTC by Monday the root cause of the problem and how it will prevent it from recurring in the future. 

Darmp Sukontasap, the cellular operator’s chief corporate affairs officer, said that as DTAC was migrating its customer registration database to a new system from Tuesday night to early Wednesday, a technical problem arose. Many customers could not get their calls through and the network became over-congested during the day, affecting almost the entire network. 

 

‘Unexpected, unprecedented’

“This incident was unexpected and unprecedented. All through this time, our technical team had been working hard to correct the situation and to address the root cause of the problem, as well as bring the connection success rate up to the normal level. Because of such efforts, the situation began to improve after 1.30pm and by 3pm, the system began to stabilise.

“However, during the high-traffic period around 5.30 to 6.30pm, there was a drop in the connection success rate, which the technical team quickly resolved to ensure that there would be no recurrence of the problem,” he said.

“Once again, all of us at DTAC would like to extend our sincere apologies to all our customers. We know that there is no way that we can make up for the time that is lost. In the meantime, DTAC will do its best to ensure that the incident does not reoccur and that all customers will remain connected with their friends and family throughout the holiday season and beyond," Darmp said.

Prawit said DTAC had proposed suspending the database migration, pending a complete identification of the problem. He told DTAC that next time it had to inform the NBTC and consumers in advance.

This case will set an example for other operators, he added.