Japan's KDDI Mobile Service Criticized After 86-Hour Failure Last Weekend (japantoday.com) 14
Earlier this week, long-time Slashdot reader ThinkPad760 wrote:
How is this not news everywhere?
KDDI, Japan's 2nd largest mobile phone provider and carrier to multiple critical government agencies — including the weather service — failed for 86 hours. After failing to inform users and the government about the problems, questions are starting to be asked.
Japan's government "will set up an expert panel to compile measures to prevent a recurrence," reports Japan Today, citing Japan's Internal Affairs and Communications Minister. The network failure occurred when a router for voice calls was replaced during regular maintenance, with repair work triggering a concentration of traffic that led the company to reduce user access. During that time, the carrier experienced a cascade of technical problems that further prolonged the connection difficultie
40 million users were affected by the outage, Reuters reports — adding that it's not the first time for something like this: Japan's three big telcos have all had widespread network failures in recent years. NTT Docomo's [29-hour] outage last October affected 12.9 customers, while disruption to SoftBank Corp's network in late 2018 cast a shadow over its bumper public listing.
KDDI, Japan's 2nd largest mobile phone provider and carrier to multiple critical government agencies — including the weather service — failed for 86 hours. After failing to inform users and the government about the problems, questions are starting to be asked.
Japan's government "will set up an expert panel to compile measures to prevent a recurrence," reports Japan Today, citing Japan's Internal Affairs and Communications Minister. The network failure occurred when a router for voice calls was replaced during regular maintenance, with repair work triggering a concentration of traffic that led the company to reduce user access. During that time, the carrier experienced a cascade of technical problems that further prolonged the connection difficultie
40 million users were affected by the outage, Reuters reports — adding that it's not the first time for something like this: Japan's three big telcos have all had widespread network failures in recent years. NTT Docomo's [29-hour] outage last October affected 12.9 customers, while disruption to SoftBank Corp's network in late 2018 cast a shadow over its bumper public listing.
Affected 12.9 customers (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Affected 12.9 customers (Score:2)
Probably .9 was a slashdot editor.
Re: Affected 12.9 customers (Score:2)
Or Reuters editor, as it turns out. Neither caught this.
Maybe it was GOING TO BE news everywhere... (Score:1)
Did anything else newsworthy happen in Japan lately and bump it down in the headlines?
Re: (Score:2)
Good theory, but I don't think so. Rather I think the story is being a bit over-dramatic about it. For example, rather than a total outage lasting almost four days, which is how it sounds from that summary, most of the services were restored much sooner. It took about four days until they announced full recovery.
Having said that, I'm still looking for more clarification on what went wrong, and it will be interesting to see how long it takes for the truth to come out. It was described as triggered by fairly
This is not new anywhere (Score:4, Informative)
How is this not news everywhere?
Well, believe it or not, but there are people living outside Japan (called "non-Japanese people") who were very minimally affected by this.
Also, private company without obligation of service fucks up. Big whoops. If you don't want that to happen again, classify them as a critical infrastructure provider and impose availability requirements on them, on pain or losing their operating license.
If they won't comply, nationalize them. For an example of how even the most staunchly ultra-liberal experiment in privatizing a critical infrastructure failed miserably because you can't trust the private sector to keep its promises, see British Rail [theguardian.com].
Re: This is not new anywhere (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
One proposal is prioritizing e.g. medical to allow mobiles to roam to other carriers since all 3 have had outages.
This is more feasible now than ever with modern cellular modems being capable of communicating on multiple bands. It wasn't too long ago that your DoCoMo iPhone wouldn't work on AU and vice versa. I assume there would need to be software changes to allow multiple APN configurations, or is that basically a non-issue with e-sim tech?
It would also be interesting if they were to impose this ability across the board, private citizens included. I imagine companies would work a little harder to fix an outage if th
Canada's largest provider failed yesterday too (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Unfunny coincidence, that. Nudging my paranoia? Actually, one of the possibilities I'm still considering is whether KDDI may have been hacked and they don't want to talk about the vulnerabilities that were exploited. Maybe Canada was just next on the target list?
Re: (Score:2)
Providers seem to be learning that if they wait a week or so to disclose the reason, typically some form of incompetence even if it was incompetence exploited by a hack, the mainstream news will no longer be interested enough to pick it up and broadcast it to the masses. It seems like these outages are becoming more common and providers are getting more sensitive about them.
Perhaps they are feeling that public anger could easily flame up and demand legislation. Many of the outages are pretty inexcusable. Fo
How is this not news everywhere? (Score:2)
Japan's KDDI Mobile Service Criticized After 86-Hour Failure Last Weekend
That's a fair question. How it is not news that the last weekend was 86 hours long? What kind of alien technology is KDDI hiding? How did none of us notice? Was it the flashy thing?
Law of the averages (Score:2)