Tokyo, 26 November, /AJMEDIA/
The Japanese government issued an administrative order Friday to NTT Docomo Inc. following a system failure last month that affected at least 12.9 million users and was labeled a “serious incident” by the communications ministry.
The ministry ordered Japan’s largest mobile carrier by subscribers to prevent a recurrence after many users nationwide were left without voice and data services at one point on Oct. 14 due to the failure caused by work on NTT’s network. It took about 29 hours for services to be fully restored.
Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Yasushi Kaneko described the incident as having had “an enormous societal impact, with the interests of users greatly hindered.”
“We must take sufficient steps to ensure it does not happen again,” he said.
The ministry also urged the company to improve ways to notify information to users after the carrier announced the restoration of services even though some customers were still having difficulty accessing the network.
Docomo President Motoyuki Ii apologized for causing trouble to customers and said he would “take the order firmly into account and strive to make sure a similar problem will never happen again.”
Ii added he is working on compensation for corporate users whose operations were disrupted by the system failure.
The law on telecommunications business stipulates that for a service handling emergency calls, a failure affecting more than 30,000 people for more than an hour is considered a serious incident.
The outage was triggered by a malfunction during work on NTT Docomo’s network of electronic payment equipment handling taxi, vending machine and other transactions, according to the telecommunications giant.
NTT Docomo submitted an incident report to the communications ministry earlier this month that outlined the causes and preventive measures, such as introducing a new system to separately control mobile phone communications from other services when a system failure occurs.
Kaneko said rival carriers KDDI Corp., the operator of the “au” brand, SoftBank Corp. and Rakuten Mobile Inc. have also been requested to conduct emergency inspections to confirm whether they have proper measures in place to prevent similar outages.
NTT Docomo has announced that eight executives, including Ii, will voluntarily return a portion of their salaries to take responsibility for the incident.
