Airtel offers SMS discounts for New Year to compensate for outage woes

Airtel is really working hard to make up to its users, who've been troubled this past week owing to the network outage at the service provider's data centre in Malad, Mumbai. Airtel users may have received SMSes today stating that to make up for the two-day ordeal, Airtel is offering them discounts on SMS sent during 31st December and the 1st January, 2012. One of the SMS states, "This New Year, send unlimited messages on 31-Dec-11 & 1-Jan-12. Standard SMS rates of Re1 for local SMS and Rs. 1.50 for STD SMS will apply on these dates",  while another one reads, "This New Year continue to enjoy SMS discount on 31st December and 1st January 2012. Standard SMS rates will not apply on these 2 days. Happy 2012". The New  Year is among those many occasions when people send out SMSes in large numbers, and a move like this one will definitely not hurt.

Offering SMS discounts for New Year

This week has been a painful ordeal for Airtel users across Mumbai, Pune and other surrounding regions. Fire breaking out at the company's data centre located in suburban Mumbai led to a complete "blackout". Services like SMS, voice calls, GPRS, among others were thrown out of gear, making communication an ordeal.

The outage that lasted for close to two days, undoubtedly caused a lot of damage to Airtel's relationship with its users, and hence this move to offer discounts seems crucial towards regaining trust.