Airtel goes off the air in Karnataka on Saturday

Bangalore, Feb 17: The services of Airtel, the country's leading telecom service provider, were severely affected in Karnataka for most part of the day today following a technical glitch, which resulted in its main server going out of stream.

The services went off the air since the early hours, affecting lakhs of subscribers. The problem arose after the servers of the telecom provider burst while taking up a technical enhancement programme to accommodate the ever-increasing subscriber base.

Airtel Chief Operating Officer V Venkatesh told sources here that the trouble started at about 0500 hrs when the engineers began work on a major enhancement of its capacity, as part of its ongoing exercise, late last night. This was was done to take care of the growing number of customers and this would take care of the add ups for the next six months.

''However, this is not a network problem, but purely a technical glitch. After the network enhancement job we have completed now, the network will be much stronger. Most of the lines have been revived and the entire set up will resume by tomorrow morning,'' he said.

Meanwhile, in a release here, Mr Deepak Mehrotra, CEO, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel Ltd, Karnataka, said that ''due to an extensive network upgradation exercise to enhance customer experience, our services were temporarily affected in small pockets of Bangalore. Our engineers have worked round the clock and the issue is now resolved. We are monitoring the situation closely.''

UNI