MTN has confirmed with ITWeb Africa that the majority of its subscribers affected by the network downtime since Sunday 14 February have now had their connections fully restored.

The mobile operator sent out a public notice late on Monday evening saying it was experiencing intermittent connection issues in South Africa that affected approximately 1 million voice, SMS and data customers.

MTN Executive for Group Corporate Affairs Chris Maroleng told ITWeb Africa that they have now come a long way in resolving the network issues. "On Sunday about a million of our users were affected by the downtime and what has happened so far is that we are in the process of restoring the service for the vast majority of those people. We are now dealing with getting back online about a hundred thousand people as I speak to you now, and we anticipate that maybe later on today we should have resolved the issue."

Maroleng says MTN will only reveal details on the duration of the downtime, whether there would be need for a network upgrade as well as how much the network downtime would have cost the business once a full report has been submitted.

"Our engineers are still looking into the matter and will provide us with a full report as soon as they have established what was the exact problem that led to downtime on our network. I don't know the exact time either. I can't give you those specifics until we have a full report because I don't want to misrepresent. The investigation at this moment is focused on trying to establish the root cause of the problem and to ensure that we do not have a similar problem on the network. Once that happens we will then be in a position to look into the other impacts of the downtime."

Maroleng also revealed that some of MTN's customers have contacted the mobile operator directly to express their concerns, although he would not say whether MTN intends to do anything more than issue an apology. "I think you are pre-empting the investigation to establish what the root cause was. As soon as we understand what was the cause then we will be in a position to decide what further action or remedial steps may be necessary. Before that I think it would be a bit it may be premature because we don't know exactly what was the root cause of this incident"

Although he committed to gathering more detail from the engineers through the course of the week, Maroleng would not disclose how many engineers MTN has assigned to resolving the network problems or from which locations they were working to resolve the issues.

"We do not give details of specific operational structures. This is not the way we respond to these media queries. Safe to say our engineers are looking into this matter and will provide us with a report."

Ahead of ITWeb Africa's conversation with Maroleng MTN had posted an announced via Twitter that the network was operating normally and they would continue to monitor it closely.