Celcom customers were left red-faced when an intermittent connectivity issue affected their Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram services this week. As usual many took to social media to show their displeasure at the operator, while many threatened to drop from using the line. The incident turned out to be an embarrassing moment for the network operator which just announced its completion of network modernisation across the country. This not what the management would have wanted at a time when the operator is trying to woo back customers after a mass exodus last year.

According to Deputy CEO Azwan Khan, the issue has been resolved and the problem was due to server connection with the affected social media sites. At a press conference yesterday, Azwan also mentioned that Celcom will be offering free one week unlimited services to these app sites as compensation for the inconvenience caused to its customers.

Is this good PR? Many on the network were mostly upset due to the lack of information on the outage, and would have appreciated if Celcom had notified to the customers instead of leaving them in the dark. In the age of lighting speed communication, a nicely worded SMS would have been suffice to allay the backlash. To borrow a commonly used phrase from Citizen Nades- No point closing the barn door after the horse had bolted comes to mind.

Here are the post announcing the restoration of the service and the compensation

We are pleased to share that we have restored data connectivity that affected your experience on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Facebook and Celcom are working together on further upgrades to enhance your experience on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. We aim to complete these upgrades by 28 April 2017.

We understand this was a regretful experience and would like to make it up to you. We will provide 1 week of FREE Facebook and WhatsApp to all Celcom subscribers. No internet quota will be deducted for Facebook and WhatsApp in this one week. We will confirm the start date on Tuesday, 25 April. Your support means a lot to us and we thank you for your patience.