There is no Maxis / Hotlink cellphone service in Kota Kinabalu. And there’s also no information on the outage it either.

Woke up this morning around 8am with no reception on my phone. No bars. Not one.

It’s not unusual for my phone to show no bars.  My phone has taken many impressive tumbles from my hands and well, now strange things sometimes happen.  It has also, on occasion, happened that my entire neighbourhood has lost coverage, so I wasn’t too hassled by it.

But by the time I left my neighbourhood and had switched my phone on and off several times (even opening the back to remove the battery and the SIM card to blow on it – hey, sometimes it does work), there was still no reception.  I happened to be in the Karamunsing Shopping Centre and popped into the Maxis Service Kiosk to ask for assistance.

“The entire system has a problem”, offered the attendant even before I could finish my sad tale of a possibly borken phone. “All our phones are down too”, he said as he pointed as his colleagues.

At lunch time, with still no reception, I went online to maxis.com.my, with a futile hope that there would be some sort of message, a public announcement, an apology or even just a clue acknowledging a problem and setting a time-line for rectifying it.

But no such luck.

I phoned the Maxis helpline to get some info, but quickly realised that every other Maxis subscriber might be doing exactly the same thing.  The line was engaged and I gave up.

We are often kept on our toes and every so often reminded what life was like before modern conveniences such as running water, electricity, internet connetions and yes, now even cellphone reception.

I wonder how long this survival training a.k.a. Maxis service interruption will last.

Update 30 June, 17:14: Brenda gave me a headsup about an update on Maxis’ website, but it simply confirms what thousands of subsribers knew already and they (Maxis) elegantly understates it by saying “… subscribers in Sabah have been experiencing some problems in making and receiving calls and SMS since early this morning…“.

I have been experiencing some difficulty making and receiving phone calls and SMSs, I’ve not had a connection, at all.  I wonder why it took them so long to put  message on their website – were they too busy answering the Complaint Line?

They also say they’re working on the problem and will restore service as soon as possible.  I would hope so.

But, I can’t help but wonder how many subscribers will switch providers before they get it going again.  And I think if they couldn’t fix the problem within hours of it happening, it’s a rather big deal.  If, according to Brenda, the outage has been since at least 2am, then we’re already looking at 15 hours of down time – wow, that’s a lot of revenue.

Somebody’s going to have a lot to explain.