The moment the signal bars on your phone disappear, a particular kind of anxiety creeps in. In a world where our bank accounts, our maps, and our social networks reside in our pockets, the severing of contact feels less like a failure of technology and more like the amputation of a limb. For thousands of subscribers to state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the last 24 hours have been a painful reminder of just how tenuous that digital lifeline is. India: Major Network Outage Cripples Key Parts Of The Country; Users In Pune, Guwahati Hit The Most.
This was no flash of wholesome disruption; this was a wall of silence. Reports began pouring in from users starting late yesterday who found themselves unable to make calls, text, or connect to mobile data. This scale of downtime raises serious questions about the public-sector telecom giant’s infrastructure resilience at a time when “always on” is the default expectation of the era.
The Geography of the Glitch
Network outages are bread and butter for the telecom industry; they’re usually confined to a single cell tower or maybe a neighbourhood, but this one was strangely broad and narrow in geography. Pune, an IT and education hub in western India, and Guwahati, the gateway to the Northeast, lie thousands of kilometres apart. This simultaneous failure in both of the larger urban centres indicates a failure of the core network rather than a simple local hardware failure.
It’s a bit like having a perfectly functional off-ramp on a highway, but the interstate bridge itself collapses. That is probably what is going on here. It looks like the “backbone” infrastructure that connects traffic between the regional circles has experienced a critical fault. Whether the reason is technical or not is of little importance to a student in Pune who wants to turn in an assignment or a trader in Guwahati closing a deal. The outcome was identical: a digital cul-de-sac.
The Human Cost of Downtime
When we discuss outages, it’s easy to throw around terms like data packets and server load. BSNL is traditionally popular among government employees, older demographics, and people living in rural and semi-urban regions of the country, where private players like Jio or Airtel may have patchy coverage. When the BP goes down, it often cuts off the most vulnerable populations.
Families reported on social media that they were unable to reach their elderly parents. And small business owners who use BSNL broadband for billing and payments had to go cash-only or close shop for the day. It’s a cascading effect. Not only is a network outage inconvenient, but it is also an economic brake. The 24-hour silence in Guwahati — the nerve centre of logistics and transport that coordinates with the rest of India — generates a daunting backlog that takes several days to clear.
The Legacy Infrastructure Challenge
To find out why this event took place, at the very back stage, behind the curtain. BSNL is upgrading its network to 4G, joining the race it has entered after its private rivals. This transition phase is perilous. It’s like trying to change the engine on a car while it is already driving down the expressway at 60 mph.
Bringing together new, modern SDN stacks with legacy hardware that could be decades old introduces friction. Although an official root cause is still in the works, insiders have called these “migration glitches”. A patch developed to enhance routing has instead caused a cascading failure, taking down servers to prevent them from being considered ‘faulty’ due to the cold-hand-for-geek-cola. State-run companies are often encumbered by procurement and then take longer to get up and running; solving that requires a level of agility frequently absent in the bureaucracy. Will the old giant ever be able to hold its own in a hyper-connected world as services slowly emerge from lingering COVID-19 effects?
