On Tuesday, consumers of Reliance Jio’s internet services were left in the lurch when an alleged fire at a data center led to a massive outage. While Reliance itself chalked up the service disruption to “minor technical issues”, Reuters quoted unnamed sources to say that the outage was the result of a fire at a data center.
It was not revealed in which data center the fire broke out, or what was the cause of the fire. What is known is that mobile and fibre internet services were impacted at least in Mumbai, though some local publications say that the impact was nationwide.
According to data from DownDetector.com, a website that tracks outages by collating status reports from different sources, Jio consumers reported as many as 10,000 instances of network error. Many consumers also took to X (formerly Twitter) to vent their frustration.
In a statement, Reliance said, “This morning some Jio customers in Mumbai faced problems in availing seamless services on account of minor technical issues. The same have been resolved. And seamless services of Jio have been fully restored. We regret the inconvenience to our subscribers.” Services were reportedly fully restored by 15:40 P.M.
According to its Annual Report released in August, Jio subscribers stood at 481.8 million in the financial year 2023-24. Of these, 108 million has migrated to 5G. According to the same report, JioAirFiber, Jio’s wireless broadband service providing high-speed internet connectivity, had 12 million subscribers across India.
