Olutokun Toriola, MTN Nigeria CEO, has announced that the telecommunications company will repay customers for airtime and data used between 12 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Saturday, one week after its service was disrupted in various regions of the country.
Mr Toriola claimed in a statement made available to newsmen on Sunday that the gesture was meant to show the network’s regret for the incident.
Due to the downtime last week, the network extended the validity of all time-bound plans by 24 hours.
“While we work to strengthen our network to prevent further disruptions of any kind, we wanted to find a way to say sorry. Something more than extending the validity of all time-bound plans by 24 hours, which we did as soon as service was restored,” Toriola said.
“So, while we can’t give you back the time you lost last Saturday, we can give you back what you spent yesterday. Every customer on the MTN network has received a refund for the data and airtime that they used between 12 noon and 7pm yesterday. We hope it shows how much we value our customers. You truly are our most important focus.”
Giving more information on the service outage, Toriola said the company’s technical teams traced the cause of the problem to an error that shifted its 4G customers onto the 3G band.
“This overloaded the 3G band, causing a domino effect that impacted the whole network,” he said, assuring that it was not sabotaged and that the issue had been addressed.
