KDDI Forms Task Force To Shield Its Systems From Another Outage

KDDI Corp., which is still recovering from a large-scale network outage that occurred on July 2, 2022, has formed a task force to investigate ways to enhance its communications equipment, the firm said Friday, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on July 9.

Photo Insert: KDDI's headquarters

President Makoto Takahashi is in charge of an internal panel that will study the reason for the outage that affected millions of consumers and create preventative measures. Based on the task force's findings, the company intends to submit a thorough report on the system failure to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry by August 1.

Following receipt of the report, the ministry will consider issuing administrative guidelines to KDDI in August or later.

According to people close to the situation, the task group was formed on Thursday with the goal of improving telecommunications infrastructure and customer service. It is made up of 100 people, including business and technical executives.

Working groups will be formed in four areas: strengthening telecommunications infrastructure, enhancing the quality of communications network operation, improving the quality of maintenance and inspection work, and reinforcing means of notifying individual and corporate customers of such concerns.

KDDI intends to examine remaining records from the equipment and communication network to establish how the failure occurred and why it lasted so long.

Separate from the task committee, the firm expects to continue conversations about compensation for companies and individuals. The network outage happened around 1:35 a.m. on July 2, making cell phone calls and messaging impossible to connect.

The entire system was not fully restored until almost 86 hours later, on Tuesday afternoon. More than 39 million customers were affected.

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