Airtel network down across India; thousands face call, internet issues

New Delhi: Telecom giant Bharti Airtel experienced a significant service disruption on Sunday, leaving thousands of users across India unable to make calls or access mobile internet.

Subscribers reported widespread issues, including frequent call drops, weak signals, and complete network blackouts. According to outage tracker Downdetector, the first complaints emerged in the morning, peaking around noon, with over 7,000 users affected simultaneously. Data from the platform indicated that more than half of the users faced calling issues, nearly a third struggled with internet access, and the remainder experienced total network failure.

The outage affected several major cities, including Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Cuttack, and Kolkata. This marks the second major disruption for Airtel in a week; a similar issue on August 19 impacted over 3,500 users nationwide.

Frustrated customers took to social media to voice their complaints. Some noted that while broadband connections remained operational, mobile networks had collapsed. Others criticised Airtel for penalising users for late payments while facing no accountability for service failures.

Users shared their experiences online: Chander Bhatia said, “I called up 198 and Airtel confirmed that there is a severe network outage and every customer is facing this issue.” Sanjay Bafna added, “Now it's more than 24 hours, but Airtel WiFi is still down / Not working!” Another user commented, “@airtelindia your mobile network is completely down in our area… broadband works fine but the complaint system itself is failing.” Some users reacted humorously, suggesting Airtel had provided a “forced digital detox.”

As of now, Airtel has not released any official statement regarding the cause of the outage or the expected timeline for full service restoration.

With IANS inputs