May 13 Airtel network disruption in T.N., Kerala highlights pitfalls of telecom growth

Bharti Airtel Ltd’s 39 million subscribers were unable to place or receive phone calls for hours on May 13, 2025. File photo
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

The hours-long downtime that subscribers of Bharti Airtel Ltd faced on May 13 throughout Tamil Nadu and Kerala highlighted the potential risks that lay in place for telecom networks as more and more people rely on them. The company’s 39 million subscribers were unable to place or receive phone calls for hours. During and immediately after the incident, the company offered no explanation for the downtime.

In a statement to The Hindu this week, Airtel offered its most detailed explanation yet on the downtime: the “service disruptions” in the States, the company said, was “due to a failure at one of our nodes.” Nodes are critical joints of a network in its vast spread throughout a country. “We can confirm that there was no cyberattack. We are committed to doing everything possible to ensure that we create the most resilient network so that customers are never inconvenienced.” Data services were not impacted, the company said. 

An industry source said that the company had formed teams to “make sure this kind of incident” doesn’t recur. A Department of Telecommunications (DoT) spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from The Hindu. 

Emergency slightly dipped that Tuesday — The Hindu learnt that in Chennai, the number of daily calls to the police’s control room stood at 466, down from an average of 500, with calls exceeding the latter number on both the previous and following day. (It was not independently verifiable if the downtime was a direct cause of the reduced number that day.)

Users on social media also complained of gig workers being cut off from calling customers. (While telecom operators are allowed to share their networks during natural disasters, there is no mandate to reroute emergency calls during network disruptions, the industry expert said.) 

Telecom network downtime — while rare — may be a pressing issue due to the level of reliance on wireless networks in India: while India has over 90 crore mobile data connections, there are only 4 crore fixed line broadband connections, most of them in cities. 

While this particular disruption was the most sweeping in terms of scope, both of Airtel’s competitors, Vodafone Idea Ltd (Vi) and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, have faced blackouts: Vi had an hours-long blackout in the national capital region in April, and Jio services reportedly went down in Mumbai last September. 

(With inputs from Srikanth R. in Chennai.)