Docomo 5G SA outage hits again, 9 hours offline, same cause
Docomo's 5G SA service broke nationwide for about nine hours on November 11, just days after a 14-hour outage. The cause was the same: congestion on a switch.
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giftdetect· the right gift in minutesDocomo's 5G SA service went down across Japan on November 11, and it was the second time in a week. Customers on the plan had trouble with calls, data and text messages for roughly nine hours.
According to NTT Docomo, the trouble began at 10:34 a.m. and was fully fixed at 7:17 p.m. Some phones showed no signal at all. The company says the cause was congestion on the switching equipment that handles 5G SA subscribers. That is exactly what went wrong on November 5, when the outage lasted about 14 hours.
Docomo says it found no sign of unauthorised access or a cyberattack.
What is Docomo 5G SA, and who was affected?
5G SA stands for Standalone. It is an option where your phone talks only to dedicated 5G equipment, not to the 4G network underneath. Docomo promotes it as a way to stay unaffected when 4G traffic is heavy.
Only 5G SA subscribers were hit. Other 5G and 4G users, and customers of MVNOs (smaller carriers that rent Docomo's network), were not affected.
What should affected users do now?
During the outage, Docomo told people that switching their network setting to 4G might get them back online. Now that service is restored, the company is asking users to switch the setting back.
The irony is hard to miss: the feature sold as a way around congestion was brought down by congestion, though of a different kind, inside the carrier's own equipment. Docomo has not said in the source material how it plans to stop a third repeat.
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