UTS experienced an outage on the Chippie mobile platform during the afternoon hours of Wednesday, October 29. This was caused by a technical issue on the the central database (called the HLR), which registers all Chippie subscribers in Chippieland to the network. The duration of the outage was approximately 6 hours. The interruption in service started around 1 PM on Wednesday afternoon with service to the Eastern Caribbean region of Chippieland restored fully by 7 pm of the same day. Incidentally, UTS Eastern Caribbean was already in the midst of the install and commissioning of a second HLR, located in St. Maarten, which would create a fail-safe in the event of a failure on the primary HLR. The project is slated to be completed soon and will prevent a recurrence of such an outage.
“UTS sincerely apologizes to our customers that were affected by the outage.” said UTS Marketing and Communication Officer, Ivy Lambert. “Our technicians worked non-stop to resolve the issue as soon as possible and thankfully were able to do so. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused our customers and thank them for their patience as we worked on restoring service. Thankfully our team had already identified the need to improve on this vulnerability in our infrastructure and the St. Maarten-based HLR project will soon be completed to avoid a recurrence. We advise any customers whose service hasn’t returned automatically to re-register to the network by restarting their device. ” Lambert continued.