THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
July 29, 2022 at 18:34 JST
KDDI Corp. President Makoto Takahashi bows in apology for the company’s massive outage earlier this month at a news conference in Tokyo on July 29. (Hiroyuki Yamamoto)
KDDI Corp. will pay 200 yen ($1.51) in compensation to each of its 35.89 million customers for the carrier’s massive service outage earlier this month.
KDDI’s President Makoto Takahashi made the announcement at a news conference on July 29, where he apologized again for the nearly three-day disruption of phone services for its customers across Japan.
The money will come in the form of deductions to customers’ upcoming bills, issued in or after September, he said.
The carrier will also pay all its 2.71 million customers who only subscribe to voice communication service the amount equivalent to two days’ worth of basic fees based on their contracts. That should amount to around 100 yen each.
The compensation will total around 7.3 billion yen, according to Takahashi.
The contracts between KDDI and its customers set out that the company is required to pay compensation to them when both voice communication service and data communication services are “totally out of use” for 24 hours or more.
The company aims to have the 200-yen reimbursement to its customers come across as a gesture of apology, as it includes those who are contractually not entitled to compensation.
Okinawa Cellular Telephone Co., KDDI’s subsidiary in Okinawa Prefecture, will also pay all its 660,000 customers 200 yen each.
It will also separately pay compensation to 70,000 customers based on their contracts.
KDDI submitted a report to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications on July 28 that described the glitch that took down its system as “a serious accident.”
According to the report, the system failure lasted around 61 hours from 1:35 a.m. on July 2 to 3 p.m. on July 4, disrupting voice communication and data communication services.
As a result, more than 30.91 million customers were affected, including around 23.16 million users of the voice communication service and more than 7.75 million customers of the data communication service.
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