BlykWatch: Report indicates Blyk service interrupted *UPDATED*

Ricky Chotai, our BlykWatch columnist, wasn’t due to report in until next week’s scheduled update — however we interrupt today’s regularly featured content to bring you this BlykWatch missive.

Ricky reports that Blyk appears to have suffered some manner of service interruption. There’s nothing about the issue on the Blyk blog or the Blyk press release section so I’ve been unable to verify this.

Ricky writes with his experience…

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Today Blyk’s free balance enquiry service ‘broke’.

The balance service is useful if you had free minutes you could not ring and had to listen to a recorded message telling you to top up. Voice calls seem to have been fixed now though. SMS same situation and still broken, messages were saying sent but never reached their destination (this is still the case). Earlier Blyk was auto replying saying you had run out of free text messages when you had not. The Blyk GPRS portal is still down. Big Big problems.

It was worse for those who had topped up with credit, Blyk reportedly used their credit up when calls were made to the balance enquiry service!

Blyk customer support is really overwhelmed massive queues and you guessed it — you’re using more of your free balance or top up when you call because of the massive waiting time.

So even more unhappy people. The Blyk forum is full of posts asking what is happening…

All Blyk appear to be telling customers (via the forum and on the phone) is that the matter is in the technical department’s hands.

This will be one big mess to sort out!

They have no public announcement on its homepage and made no effort to contact customers by text or email. So basically a lot of customers do not know what is going on and in regards to SMS are presuming that they are being sent. When they are not. Not good.

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Well, on the basis that this is a widespread issue, this will be an interesting scenario for Blyk to deal with. Massive technical failure (or so it appears) does happen.. it’s how you handle it that matters. The critical problem is perception.

Ricky still had service — from his T-Mobile handset, his primary handset. Blyk will need to act fast to ally the fears of their customers — as I’m sure the early Blyk research will have established, this target audience — the 18-25s — are entirely 100% dialtone intolerant. That is, they have never ever picked up a normal working landline phone and found no dialtone. So if it ‘ain’t working’, it will take miliseconds for the majority to mentally switch to what they’ll perceive to be a ‘real’ operator.

Blyk can fix it though. Good communication and a few smart initiatives should work. I’ve emailed their PR for a viewpoint.

UPDATE: 7am San Francisco — I just received this update from Jonathan, Sales Director at Blyk:

We recently had an incident that impacted some of our members and the issue was caused as a result of an NSN issue to which they have made the below statement:

‘Blyk and Nokia Siemens Networks have seamlessly worked in good collaboration and there have been several upgrades and expansions to the network causing no trouble whatsoever to Blyk members. This time, an unfortunate human factor came into the picture and a procedure we´ve gone trough several times, failed – causing this incident. We regret all of the trouble for the Blyk members. Now the failure has been corrected and the Blyk service works again as it should.”

Because it was an isolated incident we’re communicating this to the affected members by sms and are posting an update on our forum.

Thanks for the update Jonathan!