A nationwide disruption in services caused KDDI shares to continue to fall.
Following a huge 3.9 per cent fall, shares of KDDI continued to fall another 1.65 per cent on Wednesday. The outage in the weekend affected almost 40 million users nationwide, according to a Reuters report.
The disruption, which began in the early hours of Saturday morning, was caused by an equipment malfunction and affected services ranging from weather data to parcel delivery and banking. In a statement issued at 9:00 a.m. local time (0000 GMT) on Monday KDDI said data transmission had been broadly restored, but users might still experience difficulty in making voice calls due to service restrictions.
Serious issue
Japan’s government will take necessary measures after receiving an official report from KDDI, Yasushi Kaneko, minister for internal affairs and communications, said on Sunday. The KDDI disruption came just days before an election to the upper house of Japan’s parliament.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is promoting digital infrastructure as part of his “new capitalism” agenda to invigorate the economy. “We take this issue very seriously and expect KDDI to explain in detail what happened to those who were affected,” Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiji Kihara told reporters on Monday.
“Many couldn’t use mobile phone service-important infrastructure for daily life and the global economy-for a long time, and we find that very disappointing,” the government spokesperson said. “We deeply regret this as a telecommunications carrier in a position to support critical infrastructure and provide stable services,”KDDI President Makoto Takahashi said on Sunday.
Even as Japan is considered to be one of the top locations when it comes to data centres, the country has been facing some stress with regard to the infrastructure. A few months back, Japan’s power grid came under stress. Japan’s government issued a power supply warning in the aftermath of the March 16 earthquake. Officials said that there is tightness in the grid.
KDDI is not alone when it comes to outages. NTT Docomo’s outage during October 2021 affected 12.9 customers.
