<h3>Six-hour service outage irks Airtel customers</h3>

Hyderabad: Thousands of Airtel customers in Hyderabad went clueless on Saturday when the signal bars on their mobiles suddenly disappeared disabling them from making calls or accessing the internet. The six-hour service downtime left the customers of India’s leading mobile telecom operator, agitated, with some customers even staging a protest outside Airtel’s main office in Begumpet. It is understood that a technical snag in the regular system upgradation process has brought the network onto its heels at around 6 am on Saturday.

“I initially thought that there was some problem with my mobile so I removed and reinserted the SIM and the battery. It was only after my roommate also reported network issue that I realized that there was some problem at the service provider end,” said IT engineer Suparna Biswas. The network providers promised that the service would be restored after 1 pm. However, many customers reported disruption in network services till late in the evening. “My data network is still not working. I complained the same to the customer care,” said another user Umesh Chandra.