MobiFone users experience signal loss in HCMC

Hoang Duong, a shipper in downtown District 1, said his phone could not receive mobile signal starting around 8:15 a.m. At first, he thought it was a problem with his device, so he tried to restart his phone several times to no avail. Several of his colleagues who use MobiFone reported the same issue.

Despite not being able to call his customers, Duong could still use 4G, so he texted customers through an OTT app instead.

“People were confused because they received no announcement about this. They also didn’t know how to fix it, or when the network would return to normal,” Duong said.

The upgrade happened in the morning on the first day of the week, when communication demands were high.

Minh Anh, an office worker in Thu Duc, said that at around 8 a.m., the signal dropped when she was in the middle of a phone call with a customer. She tried removing the SIM card and installing it back in, but that did not work. After contacting MobiFone customer service, she was told that the system was rebooting and that the situation would return to normal in about five minutes. But an hour passed and the signal did not return.

At 9:30 a.m., a MobiFone representative confirmed that users in HCMC experienced disrupted service on Monday morning. The provider was performing a system reboot which affected users “in a short amount of time,” the representative said. The reboot happened in one district at a time.

Thanh Hung, a representative of a delivery service in HCMC, said a phone network suddenly losing signal without a warning “rarely happens.”

Hung said his company had to enlist the help of extra personnel to call customers using landlines to apologize and give them updates on the situation.

“Not just in HCMC, but some customers in Long An Province (which borders the city) also had the same problem. We had to switch to an OTT service for communications,” he said.

At noon the same day, MobiFone had issued an apology to its customers regarding the fact that phones in the southern regions encountered call and data issues. The network was deploying measures to resolve the problem, the carrier said.

By noon, several MobiFone users in HCMC, Long An, Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta and Da Lat in the Central Highlands were still reporting the issue.

This was not the first time MobiFone had signal problems.

One evening in September 2020, users in HCMC could not call, text or use 3G and 4G services, and the issue was also reported in other localities like Da Nang and some provinces. MobiFone said there was a connectivity issue going on, and the problem was resolved within the day.