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Airtel Zambia suffers major network outage

By , Zambia Contributor
Zambia , 04 Dec 2023
With a market share of roughly 50%, Airtel is Zambia's top mobile telecommunications company.
With a market share of roughly 50%, Airtel is Zambia's top mobile telecommunications company.

Airtel Zambia has had a system failure, leaving millions of people in the Southern African country in the dark since the weekend.

All service subscription applications, including Airtel Money, were unavailable since late Saturday and throughout much of Sunday until the operator announced in the evening that certain services had been restored.

Late Sunday, Airtel announced that services on the unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) codes 115 and 117, as well as services on the MyAirtel app, had been fully restored.

The USSD codes for Airtel Money for purchasing bundles are as follows.

"Our engineers are still working to ensure that services for all applications are restored," said Airtel Zambia.

The Airtel Money Mastercard was one of the services that were unavailable at the time of publication.

Airtel apologised to its customers, who were dissatisfied with the network outage.

The cell operator confronts a difficult task in responding to the flood of inquiries from affected customers.

Subscribers complained that monies were debited from their Airtel Money accounts despite the transactions failing.

Others reported purchasing electrical units but not receiving them, despite cash being withdrawn.

With a market share of roughly 50%, Airtel is Zambia's top mobile telecommunications company.

As of the end of 2022, the country has around 19,8 million subscribers.

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