Pelephone CEO Gil Sharon on Monday ruled cyber-attack out as a possible cause of
the nearly four-hour break in the company’s phone and texting services Sunday
night, and promised to compensate its customers.
“We completely reject
that possibility,” he said when asked about the possibility of cyber-attack in
an interview with Army Radio. “We haven’t identified a single suspicion of that
kind of infiltration.”
According to the company, it is still
investigating the malfunction that brought down its services from the hours of
7:05 p.m. until around 11:00 p.m. Sunday night. It was quick to point out that
its data services remained intact, allowing Pelephone customers unable to make
phone calls or send text messages to rely on Internet applications such as
WhatsApp and Viber to communicate.
“Apparently there was failure in one
of the network components,” he explained to Channel 2 Monday morning. “Company
engineers in the control center scanned each component until they found the
problematic one.”
“The handling of the breakdown made a quick solution in
a reasonable amount of time possible. In the end, we neutralized part of the
network, and the whole network was able to recover quickly. The cause of the
breakdown has not yet been found, only its area, which has been neutralized,” he
later explained.
The company promised to compensate customers with either
60 minutes of free calls in Israel, 60 minutes of international calls, or 500
megabytes of Internet access.
Earlier in the day, the Nagar-Tanus- Abu
Medeiras law firm filed a NIS 450 million lawsuit against Pelephone in the
Nazareth district court over the service interruption, requesting that the court
recognize it has a class action suit.
The suit, filed on behalf of a
customer named Tom Lifshitz, requested NIS 100 in damages and NIS 50 in
emotional damages, citing the fact that mobile communications are an integral
part of daily life and their absence left him unable to make personal or
work-related calls, leaving him feeling “helpless.”
Globes contributed to
this report.