'Error' blamed as China Unicom network suffers major outage across mainland

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'Error' blamed as China Unicom network suffers major outage across mainland

PUBLISHED : Friday, 20 March, 2015, 2:27pm
UPDATED : Friday, 20 March, 2015, 8:23pm

Adrian Wan [email protected]

State-owned China Unicom has 296 million mobile subscribers and 69 million fixed-line broadband users. Photo: Reuters

Many China Unicom customers across mainland China complained of being disconnected for more than half an hour today, including websites hosted on the major network.

Users and subscribers under state-owned Unicom began reporting connection problems at about 11.30am, Beijing time, taking to popular microblog Weibo to vent their frustration.

“My WeChat messages couldn’t be sent, and my 3G network was down. Even the 10010 service hotline was busy,” said one China Unicom user on Weibo.

Many reports said websites and apps could not be accessed on smartphones, computers and other devices during the period.

Connections reportedly went back up and running at around 12.10pm, about 40 minutes after the network went down.

China Unicom said on its Weibo that an error on a unit of its backbone network led to the outage for some broadband users from 11.25am to 11.45am. No more details were given.

The incident is believed to be one of most major interruptions on the Unicom network in recent years. The cause is unknown.

It is also unclear how many of its 296 million mobile subscribers and 69 million fixed-line broadband users were affected.

But users in various cities and provinces across mainland China, including Beijing, Hebei, Tianjin, Shandong, Sichuan, Xian and Anhui, also reported problems.

The outage made the headlines on top news portals nationwide, especially as users have long complained about China Unicom's relatively weaker and unstable connection services in comparison to its top rival China Mobile.

China Mobile is also a state-owned telecom network operator.