IP: Phone Outage Hits Tokyo

[Dave Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Phone Outage Hits Tokyo


A computer fault took out mobile telephone services in Tokyo Wednesday
afternoon for three hours between 1.30pm and 4.30pm. The problems
occurred in systems that accessed a subscriber database in Tokyo's
Kita ward and resulted in loss of service for all subscribers to the
NTT DoCoMo network in the area. NTT DoCoMo is Japan's number one
mobile telephone network and the outage at the height of the business
day resulted in around 3,000 complaints said the company. The network
was brought back to life when reserve units were activated by
engineers. The backup devices should have come on automatically but
didn't causing the service loss.