MTN Ghana has announced it will offer customers airtime and data as a token of appreciation for “their patience during the service disruption that occurred on the night of 14 December 2016.”

The disruption, according to the leading telecommunications company in Ghana, “was the result of a technical problem related to Internet Protocol that affected many MTN sites.”

“MTN Engineers worked quickly to resolve the problem and were able to fully restore the affected sites in less than two hours,” said a release dated Friday, December 16, 2016.

MTN says it will offer customers a choice of free 30 minutes MTN-to-MTN airtime or free 20MB of data as compensation for the disruption.

“Customers will have the freedom to select their preferred option via shortcode. The Company states it is currently in the process of setting up the shortcodes that customers will use to make their selection and will announce the short code numbers as soon as set up is complete,” said the release signed by Cynthia Lumor, Corporate Services Executive.

Customers will be able to select and activate their choice of free airtime or data from 17 December till 11:59 PM on 23rd December 2016.

“Once the selection is made the package will be activated immediately and the customer will have 24 hours within which to use the package,” MTN Ghana said.

Mrs Cynthia Lumor said “we are aware the disruption inconvenienced our valued subscribers, and we regret that.  Although this was something that was beyond our control and not anticipated we believe it is important to offer free airtime or data as a token of our appreciation to our customers for the patience they exercised as we worked to resolve the problem.”

Mohammed Rufai, Chief Technical Officer, MTN Ghana also assured customers that MTN has stringent measures in place to curb the recurrence of the incident.

“Our critical core network elements have redundancy, meaning we have at least two of each critical core network element. We have invested significantly in making sure that there is always a spare critical element to carry traffic in the unlikely event of a network failure,” he stated.

MTN says it remains committed to providing reliable services to its cherished customers.