Econet Rubbish Blackout WhatsApp News Report

Yesterday we published a post were a WhatsApp based news alert service, Kukurigo, claimed that Econet was on the edge of a catastrophic precipice due to foreign currency shortages. Well, Econet has come out and explicitly denied the report is true.

What Kukurigo said

According to these Kukurigo guys they had classified intel from Econet insiders who opened up, explaining some of the network issues and especially the fateful network glitch that affected a lot of users weeks ago.

Sources inside Econet said the critical computer system housed at Pockets Hill, Highlands failed early March forcing engineers to direct its entire network load to the second server housed in Harare’s Willovale industrial area.

The technical patchwork is said to be responsible for recent peak hour network outages.

“The network relies on two Home Location Register servers to balance the network load and also for the purposes of redundancy, we cannot run a network on one server because the load is too heavy which is why you have seen the network failing around 1900hrs which is our peak traffic hour,” said an Econet source who spoke on condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to speak to the Press.

The Home Location Register is a computer system responsible for authenticating legitimate subscriber connections on the network and the services available to them.

Econet’s response

Econet has issued their rebuttal and it’s not one of those coy, wink-wink responses that you normally get from PR people. It’s a clear and unequivocal denial.

Econet Wireless is aware of an inaccurate message doing the rounds on some social media groups, quoting unnamed sources who claim that the company ‘risks a blackout after losing a backup node

We wish to assure our valued customers, stakeholders and the public at large, that the network remains sound and stable, and is not at risk of any blackout.

We have put in place robust measures to mitigate against the challenges we face and are working closely with our regulators and the responsible authorities to find solutions to the challenges we face

As already mentioned in our original report on the Kukurigo guys, this news service has a habit of rushing to dish out stuff without doing their due diligence. We all make this mistake sometimes but these guys do so more than others.

Econet would like to assure everyone that their Home Location Registers are safe.