more-in Aircel customers on Wednesday queued up at customer care outlets as they were unable to port out of the telecom service provider. There was a network issue across Tamil Nadu and many users were neither able to make calls nor access the internet. At one of the outlets, a representative who wished anonymity, said, “There is huge traffic and the network is a little slow. We request our customers not to panic as the company is working on sending out the codes to those who want to port out.” S. Aishwarya, a software engineer, said, “It has been more than three days and I have not yet got my code to port out. There are several senior citizens who have an Aircel connection but are clueless on what is happening. The firm should automatically send the port out number to its customers,” she said. K. Sankara Narayanan, head – SBU (South), Aircel, said traffic was 10 times more and, as a result, they were unable to service port out requests. “Tomorrow (Thursday) we are going to manually push UPC codes to all customers who applied on Wednesday. We will send it to their alternative mobile numbers, wherever it is available,” he added. On Wednesday, Aircel’s website said, “Page Not Found. The page you have requested has moved, may not exist or cannot be accessed at this time,” said the message in red colour. At Washermanpet, more than 50 subscribers came to the firm’s office as they were facing signal issues. Worried that the service provider would shut down, they staged a road roko. The police dispersed the crowd. Tamil Nadu is a crucial market for Aircel and the firm has a customer case of 1.5 crore. According to TRAI’s annual report 2015-16, Aircel has a subscriber base of over 87.09 million in India. Employees worried A few Aircel employees in Chennai were worried about the situation leading to job loss. Three employees with whom The Hindu spoke to said that there were rumours, but they were not sure what was in store. “The focus now is to help customers and we have been flooded with calls and mails,” said a representative at Aircel’s Chennai office. But a senior official indicated that there will be several thousand job losses across the country. On Wednesday, marketing teams from Airtel and Vodafone were wooing clients from Aircel across the city. Aircel has been facing several challenges for the last few months. Earlier this month, Idea Cellular suspended interconnect services with Aircel Ltd. due to non-payment of dues. “Despite several reminders for releasing the dues since November 2017, the operator failed to meet payment commitments, forcing Idea to suspend interconnect services as per the terms of interconnect agreement between both parties,” Idea Cellular said in a statement.

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