Jio Outage Affects Calls and SMS; Is 4G to 5G Tower Migration the Reason?

Reliance Jio, India's largest telecom operator, faced an outage earlier today. This outage affected several subscribers as they were unable to make or receive calls and send or receive SMS. The outage was reported earlier today, starting at 6 AM, and lasted for a few hours.

While Jio has witnessed outages in the past, the three-hour-long disruption in its services was different. While the calling and SMS services were impacted, the mobile data was working fine for most Jio subscribers.

Jio Outage Leaves Many Users Impacted

Several Jio users who were affected by the outage took to Twitter to raise complaints about the issue. The Jio Care official Twitter handle is responding to users who are taking to their social media handles, but the service provider has not acknowledged the outage as yet.

The outage detection website DownDetector showed that hundreds of users were affected by the Jio outage. Most reports were from all major cities, including Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Nagpur. It reported nearly 600 reports soon after the outage news started circulating.

Though SMS is used rarely, it is important for two-factor authentication and receiving OTPs for account logins. Eventually, this impacted many users who were trying to log in to services. As of now, Reliance Jio has not come up with any official statement on the outage but the issues appear to be fixed. While I faced disruption in making calls on Jio earlier today, now it appears to be working fine.

Why This Jio Outage?

While there is no clarity on what caused the Jio outage and there is no official confirmation as well, there are reports that speculate the 5G migration to be the cause. As India is stepping into the 5G era and Reliance Jio has started expanding its 5G network coverage across the country, it is migrating its mobile towers from 4G to 5G.

However, only an official confirmation from the company can clarify why this outage happened. This is not the first time that Jio has faced an outage as such an incident was also reported earlier this year. That said, we will update you when the telecom operator speaks on the issue.