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New Delhi, Aug 24 (IANS) Telecom major Bharti Airtel faced a major service disruption on Sunday, leaving thousands of its customers across the country unable to make calls or use mobile internet.

Subscribers reported widespread issues such as call drops, weak signals and even complete network blackouts.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, the first complaints began in the first half of the day and peaked during noon, with more than 7,000 users reporting problems at the same time.

Data from the platform showed that over half of the affected users faced calling issues, nearly a third struggled to access the internet, and the rest experienced a total network failure.

The outage was reported from several major cities, including Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Cuttack and Kolkata.

This is the second major disruption for Airtel within a week. On August 19, a similar problem had impacted more than 3,500 users across India.

As the services faltered, frustrated customers turned to social media to express their anger.

Some users on X complained that while their broadband connections were working, the mobile network had completely collapsed.

Others questioned why customers face immediate penalties for late bill payments, but companies face no accountability when services break down.

A user named Chander Bhatia said “I called up 198 and Airtel confirmed that there is severe network outage and every customer is facing this issue.”

Another user named Sanjay Bafna said “Now it's more then 24 hrs but Airtel WiFi is still down / Not working!”

“@airtelindia your mobile network is completely down in our area… broadband works fine but the complaint system itself is failing,” another user commented.

A few, however, chose to take it lightly, joking that Airtel had given them a “forced digital detox.”

So far, Airtel has not issued any official statement explaining the cause of the disruption or when services would be fully restored.

--IANS

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