Fire at data centre likely cause of India-wide outage for Jio users: Report

A fire at a data centre at India's largest telecom carrier Reliance Jio caused a nationwide network outage for its users on Tuesday, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Website Downdetector.com, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed more than 10,000 Jio users have reported the issue.

The website also showed that more than half of the affected users were facing issues related to their mobile network, while others had mobile internet and broadband-related complaints.

"The fire has been brought under control and the servers should restart operations soon," the person said on condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to speak to the media.

Jio did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Jio leads India's telecom space with nearly 489 million subscribers as of June-end, ahead of its rival Bharti Airtel's 281.4 million subscribers and Vodafone Idea's 128 million subscribers, per data from Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea told Reuters that they did not experience any similar disruptions across their networks.

(Reporting by Indranil Sarkar, Hritam Mukherjee and Aleef Jahan in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza and Sonia Cheema)