|
By Jorge Casuso
September 5 – Dozens, if not hundreds, of Santa
Monica cell phone users have been without service for three days
after their cell phone provider mysteriously hung up their service.
Angry customers of Payless Cellular have been marching to the company’s
store at 2600 Wlishire Boulevard, where they have been greeted by a security
guard and given instructions that don’t work. Their calls to the company
have gone unanswered.
“This outage is a joke!” U.B. wrote in one of a dozen blogs posted
on insiderpages.com. “I'm without my cell phone for the last 2 days, and
I cannot find the solution yet... they don't respond to my emails, no one is
picking up the customer service line or no explanation about what's going on
at all.”
“This outage has REALLY hurt me, as it is my business phone,” wrote
Maria V. “This service issue is bad enough -- outrageous -- but the message
to callers coupled with the deceiving information I was given . . . was, in
my opinion, just a ploy to keep the customer hanging on.”
A notice on the Payless Cellular homepage attributed the problem to “a
catastrophic network failure” that took place at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
“We have not fully assessed what caused this failure but know that many
thousands of customers have been affected,” the company wrote.
One explanation making the rounds blames hackers for the system crash.
“They told my friend that their system was hacked into and they shut
everything down to restore their security features,” wrote Hey N. “Fact
or fable?”
Some customers aren’t buying any of it.
“Usually you fix these things pretty quickly,” said Joseph Fitzsimons,
a customer who works a few blocks from the Santa Monica store. “They’re
pretty easy to fix.”
Some customers suspect the Southern California-based company – which
has operated for more than 20 years under same name and management – may
have gone out of business.
“Is this cellular place maybe going out of business? Just a thought,”
wrote Andrew K. “I have never seen an outage like this.”
Those who visited the company’s web site, its store in Santa Monica or
one of its providers were given a number to manually program their phone. But
that didn’t work.
“Trying to reach anyone at Payless Cellular or Cellular Fantasy is totally
impossible,” wrote David O. “I had to drive down to Santa Monica
from Burbank to go into Cellular Fantasy and complain. There were at least 50
people there complaining about the same problem. We were all given a slip of
paper with a code number on it.”
“Yeah, we went through that ‘activation routine’ they described,”
wrote Norman J. “That was seven hours ago!”
On its web site, Payless Cellular tried to assuage its customers.
“Please be assured that we are working diligently to restore your service
as quickly as possible and will keep you updated on our progress. We ask for
your patience and thank you for your understanding during this challenging time.”
But that didn’t seem to work either.
“What bothers me most is the message people get when they try to call
me -- that the phone is disconnected,” Brad concluded. “This outage
is just outrageous.”
|
