Telecom operator Bharti Airtel faced a major service disruption on Monday, across the country, leaving thousands of users, particularly from the Delhi-NCR region, unable to make calls or access mobile data.

Outage-tracking portal Downdetector showed a sharp rise in user reports from 3:20 PM, with as many as 3,432 complaints during the peak. The problem appeared to be nationwide, with users in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and other metros flagging difficulties. Much of the issues were pertaining to no signal and mobile phone connectivity issues with few reporting problems with mobile data as well.

The outage map highlighted large clusters of service failures across urban centres, suggesting both voice and data networks were hit.

Users reported that they were unable to make transactions due to non-receipt of OTP and verification codes. Across social media, #AirtelDown has already been trending on X with users also citing dropped calls, non-functional data services, and SIMs failing to connect despite active recharges as issues being faced by them. A few users even wrote that such poor services may prompt them to switch to alternative services providers.

While the issue has not been resolved yet, in a statement on social media, Airtel also acknowledged the outage and said its team was working to restore connectivity.

“We are currently experiencing a network outage; our team is actively working to resolve the issue and restore services promptly. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused,” the company said.