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KDDI mobile service failure ends after 86 hours; minister criticizes company's handling of disruption

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Ouch!

2 ( +3 / -1 )

the government will set up an expert panel

naturally!

4 ( +15 / -11 )

"It is very regrettable this happened. We will immediately convene a meeting to decide when to have a meeting about this regrettable incident. We will fax you the details when they have been decided."

-7 ( +12 / -19 )

It is extremely regrettable! [bow]

-5 ( +9 / -14 )

I guess the Minister was on au.

9 ( +10 / -1 )

Minister criticizes KDDI's handling of network disruption

I tried to call and complain directly, but I couldn't connect.

-2 ( +4 / -6 )

Bring on the Panel, customers will still be none the wiser by Christmas.

A full independent inquiry, with all the current technical data published within 48 hours.

Health minister Shigeyuki Goto has requested the country's 47 prefectures make efforts to avoid any impact on medical services in case a similar situation repeats, he told reporters Tuesday.

Some municipalities have reported that medical facilities were unable to communicate with on-call doctors and drivers who were delivering pulse oximeters to coronavirus patients because of the outage, he said.

"To ensure there is no serious interference to medical and nursing-care services, we will work with prefectural governments to secure a stable system from normal times," Goto said.

Sorry, this is headless chickens running around in circles.

-2 ( +6 / -8 )

Possible cyber attack by China?

-7 ( +3 / -10 )

From AU own homepage.

"mobile carrier with the highest customer satisfaction rate in Japan."

About to be changed to "mobile carrier with most bows in Japan."

With the current power crisis, you think they could turn off their shop logos at 1am at night.

Or should turn them off until they fix the problem at least.

-2 ( +4 / -6 )

Modern technology, not Japans strong point. Now green tea, they got that in the bag.

-4 ( +6 / -10 )

Oh my god!? The minister criticised his boss??

unqccpetable!

let’s sweep that under the carpet with a couple of bows and sumimasens….

-6 ( +7 / -13 )

A number colleagues, AU customers, have visited to there supplier, retail outlet to cancel there contract.

Because AU will not provide a valid explanation.

I didn't ask if they had been been offered any compensation.

They still seem to be having signal strength issues, as well as intermittent data outages, slow page loading.

1 ( +4 / -3 )

Imagine if they ran a nuclear power plant. Not something you want to…….oh

-3 ( +5 / -8 )

He is absolutely right to be critical, but isn’t it his portfolio to ensure that the telecom companies are operating up to scratch BEFORE something happens.

I strongly suspect this is similar to the case of the cyber security minister who had never used a computer. What qualifications does Yasushi Kaneko have to understand how telecoms should operate? Spoiler: none, he is a career politician. How does the layer of bureaucrats below him look? No idea, but probably not much better.

My questions are what experts do they have? What outage monitoring/oversight was in place? How much money/gifts/amakudari goes on between his ministry and the telecom companies?

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

All AU, KDDI Corp has to do is to be professionals and answer customer questions openly, to be proactive.

State clearly why such an outage occurred. It isn't difficult .

However for some considerable time mobile operators have been handcuffing there customers into swinging monthly payment contracts.

Now when the service collapses they run for cover and close the hatch.

It is an outrage.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

Sabatoge ? Some country causing this crash perhaps?..or just inept ?

-4 ( +1 / -5 )

Itsonlyrockandroll, bang on mate. The instinct to freeze then hide ain’t a good look, especially for a company that size. More J Leadership 101 on show. Weakness is the game.

-3 ( +2 / -5 )

Like all things technology will fail, and the result people will complain.

4 ( +6 / -2 )

Why does anyone care why the outage happened? What are they going to do, rush down to HQ and fix it? Are they going to demand a complete description of the entire infrastructure and list and technical specs of all the equipment and the code for all the software and firmware?

-3 ( +0 / -3 )

Remember the old days when Japanese tech was reliable.

Now we are trying to keep alive the systems made on the 80s.

Too bad that the engineers back then live in retirement.

-8 ( +2 / -10 )

The government should require KDDI to provide detailed information on why, how, what, when, and where this outage occurred. The government should issue a "serious incident" declaration and instruct KDDI to make improvements to prevent this from happening again. And, KDDI should describe its plans, give dates, and frequent progress reports to the government.

I would like to ask some specific questions. For example, how much diversity and redundancy is built into KDDI's network. Let's say for example a prefecture was cut off from KDDI's fiber network. Would people in the prefecture still be able to use their phones to call each other, 110, and 119? Or (as I suspect) are we all dependent on the big switch in central Japan. Does the Senior VP of Engineering sit on the board? Does he have the autonomy to insure reliability over sales? How much does KDDI spend on network growth and reliability each month? (They should be spending at least $1,000,000,000 on network growth and reliability each month bases on other companies of similar size (Verizon, ATT, Vodaphone, etc.) Japan Today reporters should be asking these questions and reporting it here.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

Richard BurganToday  09:51 pm JST

The government should require KDDI to provide detailed information on why, how, what, when, and where this outage occurred.

Why, how and what, when and where are irrelevant to the customer.

I would like to ask some specific questions. For example, how much diversity and redundancy is built into KDDI's network. Let's say for example a prefecture was cut off from KDDI's fiber network. Would people in the prefecture still be able to use their phones to call each other, 110, and 119? Or (as I suspect) are we all dependent on the big switch in central Japan. Does the Senior VP of Engineering sit on the board? Does he have the autonomy to insure reliability over sales? How much does KDDI spend on network growth and reliability each month? (They should be spending at least $1,000,000,000 on network growth and reliability each month bases on other companies of similar size (Verizon, ATT, Vodaphone, etc.) Japan Today reporters should be asking these questions and reporting it here

Why? Are you writing a book? Do you think you’re smarter and more experienced than everyone at KDDI? JT reporters?

The market will affect KDDI more than someone on the Internet.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

People addicted to Twitter and Instagram must have been having withdrawal symptoms such as uncontrollable shaking and twitching. Tooooo bad LOOOOOL!!!

-5 ( +1 / -6 )

They do not report on it properly here (not sure about other news pages) but KDDI has been releasing technical information about the problem and following up with post mortems. Just because people don't understand it does not mean they are not open about it. Gotta love the IT pseudo experts in the comments here.

https://xtech.nikkei.com/atcl/nxt/news/18/13237/?i_cid=nbpnxt_ranking

3 ( +3 / -0 )

This sort of thing happens with all tech. It will happen more in the future courtesy of supply chain issues with replacement kit and lack of skilled staff.

An expert committee is not going to give you 100% uptime.

Technology is not magic. Every component and line of code you add increases the complexity and the likelihood of failure.

If you want to 'pivot to digital', accept that stuff won't work every now and again, and have a 'plan B'. Digital is often less resilient than analogue/physical.

quote: The Japan Meteorological Agency has demanded that KDDI come up with measures to prevent a similar incident.

It's not possible. The JMA should be sorting out a 'Plan B' for 'when' their comms goes down, not 'if'.

A little realism would be helpful. No matter how much you pay, all tech fails at some point, and more complex, cascade failures take longer to fix. Life is not a SciFi movie. You are not on board the Enterprise. Get real.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

This sort of thing happens with all tech.

There is replication, failover, failbacks, redundancy...

A big telecom cannot fail, it's not plausible.

...only in Japan.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

expert panel to compile measures to prevent a recurrence

which will just be paperworks, mostly requiring the company to “promise” it will not happen again.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

GBR,the JMA sucks, especially with that anime mascot

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

Good thing none of KDD's paying customers had any urgent matters or emergencies during those 86 hours.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

minister criticizes company's handling of disruption

What else would minister do? Easiest job in the world…

0 ( +2 / -2 )

@bokuda UK mobile networks have outages too. One of the latest: EE is DOWN: Network crashes leaving users across the UK unable to use their mobile internet https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10941831/EE-Network-crashes-leaving-users-UK-unable-use-mobile-internet.html All tech systems, including banking and mobile networks, have outages.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Sure it took you a lot of time and effort to find a single 1st country telecom with an outrage.

Too bad that EE is minor, it affected just some hundreds and it was less than an hour.

Not comparable with the millions of users across Japan for 86 hours of the 2nd biggest Japanese telecom.

Otsukare!

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

@Bokuda.

I'm busy. I checked back, saw your post, Googled for the first one as an example, and posted it.

The UK gets banking and mobile outages on a regular basis. Most are short but when the TSB botched their IT upgrade in April 2018. It cost the bank £330m and left nearly 2m people locked out of their bank accounts for up to a month.

Most customers won't notice basic issues because, as you say, systems have fallback procedures, but all systems will sometimes go down for a longer period of time - hours or days - and it is not realistic to expect 100% uptime with such services.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Tell me, when was the last time any stock exchange went down.

Or a big bank's ATMs.

Or a nuclear plant blown out.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

25% of Canada lost Wifi internet access. ATM’s and emergency services gone for 19 hours.

I thought only Japan was stupid enough for things like this?

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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