Fire blacks out Airtel network, again

Around 36 lakh customers of Bharti Airtel across the state’s western region woke up to a network outage on Tuesday. The services of the telecom company were disrupted after a fire — the second in three years — broke out in its data centre at Malad around 2.30am.  No one was injured in the mishap.

Apart from voice calling service, data facilities such as GPRS, 3G and CDMA were hit. Voice calling service had partially started by evening. BlackBerry customers in Mumbai too were affected. The fire officials said short-circuit could be the cause of the fire.

The fire broke out on the fourth floor of the seven-storey building. The blaze broke out in the 2,000sqm-server room, damaging the entire electrical installation. “The wiring on the wall and the ceiling, all the electrical installations and cables were damaged,” said a senior fire official.

Although the fire was a minor one, it took the fire department around six hours to douse it. “The inbuilt gas separation system was not functional so we could not find the source of fire. The equipment automatically switches on at the time of fire and separates smoke,” the official added.

The fire rescue operation was completed at 7.08am.

“Employees were working at the Business Processing Outsourcing unit and around a thousand people were in the building when the fire broke out. We rescued all of them,” said HN Muzawar, chief fire officer.

However till late evening, Airtel customers were grappling with network woes. Angry customers flooded Airtel’s official website on Tweeter with their critical remarks.

Airtel customer Anish Garg was out of town and his work was stuck due to connectivity problem. “I was expecting an important call from work. I wasn’t left with any option but to get a new telecom connection,” said Garg.

Airtel spokesperson couldn’t say when the services would be resumed.

“Mobile voice, BlackBerry and SMS services have largely been restored and are stabilising. We are working towards restoring 2G & 3G data services later tonight. However, for the enterprise services such as IPLC, leased lines, MPLS and Internet services, restoration work is in progress and services are likely to be restored in the next 24 hours,” said Airtel.

This is for the second time in three years that Airtel services were hit due to fire. In July 2008, a fire broke out at Airtel’s office at Peninsula tower. It had taken the company a month to rectify the network snag.