based telecom operator du confirmed late Sunday that a massive network glitch that affected hundreds of mobile phone users have now been fixed.

A spokesperson for the company told Gulf News that the cause of the technical problem that led to a network failure that lasted for nearly six hours has been identified, adding that it has apologised to its subscribers for the inconvenience caused.

Mobile phone users complained early on Sunday that they were unable to access the Internet or make and receive calls, with WiFi and mobile phone connections reportedly down since 9am. Du confirmed that the outage lasted for a total of five hours and 50 minutes.

“With regard to the degradation of du mobile services, experienced by some of our customers today, we would like to inform the impacted customers that all mobile services have now been restored,” du said in a statement sent to Gulf News

“We identified the root cause and our technical teams responded swiftly to resolve it. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Mobile phone users in the UAE took to social media to complain about the interruption on the mobile network.

Subscribers, both on prepaid and post-paid accounts in Dubai and other emirates, including Fujairah, said they have been experiencing issues since Sunday morning, with text messages and phone calls unable to get through for hours.

“I have been having issues this morning. When I try to make a call, I get a message saying not on registered network. On Friday, I migrated from a business account to prepay,” said one mobile phone user.

“I was driving near International City when I noticed I could not access the Internet. I thought it was just poor network signal,” one European expatriate who maintains a post-paid account, told Gulf News.

Some customers who called up du’s customer service have been advised that there have been technical issues with regards to the company’s billing system, which may have contributed to the delay.

“My voice signal’s been on and off for the past hour, no data since early morning. I called them at around 9am earlier, the [customer service agent] told me that they had issues with their billing system which might explain the sudden cut-offs,” said another subscriber

source : gulfnews