Vodacom, South Africa’s largest mobile phone operator, says it expected that all customers that were double debited for their December accounts to have been refunded by today. By Staff Writer
Vodacom spokesman Tshepo Ramodibe attributed the incident, which affected about 200 000 accounts, to a technical problem with certain payment files that resulted in a selection of accounts being presented twice for funds collection.
“We have reviewed the incident and associated processes to rule out a recurrence,” said Ramodibe.
Last week Friday, Vodacom sent an SMS to customers informing them that the company was aware that some accounts had been debited twice owing to a “technical glitch”.
On Tuesday, Vodacom confirmed that the majority of the refunds were processed on Monday and it expected that all funds to reflect this morning (Tuesday, 5 January).
The mobile phone operator said the balance of refunds will reflect during the course of the day and the completion of the refunds will be accompanied by an SMS notification.
“We are working with the financial institutions to finalise the bank charges related to the erroneous debits and would like to assure our customers that these will be repaid to them as per our commitment,” explained Ramodibe.
The Vodafone-owned operator apologised to its affected customers and thanked them for their patience.
“Once again, we apologise for the error and inconvenience caused. We would like to thank the affected account holders for their patience and understanding. We’d also like to thank our banking partners for playing their part in expediting the reimbursements,” said Ramodibe.
Vodacom is not the only major South African company to suffer technical glitches in recent months.
First National Bank (FNB) and Standard Bank suffered glitches last year that affected services such as online banking.
Meanwhile, internet services, contact centres and shops affiliated with telecoms company Telkom were briefly offline on May 18 last year following a network switch failure at one of its data centres in Centurion, Gauteng.
