September 10, 2008

To Our Valued Payless Cellular Customers

RE: Payless Cellular Service Outage

 

We sincerely apologize for what we are certain has been an extraordinary inconvenience to you since our cellular/data service disruption occurred on Tuesday, September 2, 2008.  Payless Cellular has been operating for over 17-years and we have never had a technological/service failure of this magnitude.  We regret this inconvenience and thank you for continued patronage and patience.

What happened?  A significant number of our cell phone accounts were erroneously dropped from the network.  The network would not recognize the phone numbers for inbound or outbound data or voice transmissions as you all know.  Initially we thought approximately 500 accounts were affected, however we realized as the situation developed, the total number of accounts was in excess of 5,000.

Why did the outage occur?  To be candid, we still do not know with certainty what caused or contributed to this network failure.  We have committed resources to identify the cause of this problem and assured us that corrective measures will be quickly implemented to prevent reoccurrence.

What is now being done?  Accounts are systematically being activated hourly.  This process does require a technician to input your phone number and go through a sequence of activation steps.
 
When will I have my service restored?  For some of you it will be necessary to key in *22890 and press send to resume activity.  If you call your cell phone from another number and hear a busy signal, you will know your phone is in the process of being reactivated.

What will Payless Cellular do going forward?  We are committed to excellent customer service and maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.  Obviously we hope to retain your business and want to regain your trust.  This circumstance was unforeseeable and we have been responding to it to the best of our ability.  We realize for some of you, that may be not enough, however we ask you to consider our desire to keep you as a customer.  We will work tirelessly to insure Payless Cellular takes all necessary steps to safeguard your service from any future outages.  In addition, we will be contacting you regarding account credits and a special promotion in hopes of retaining your valued business.

We again offer our sincere apology for this service interruption.  We know this has been very frustrating and hope we can demonstrate our commitment to giving you the best service possible in the months and years ahead.

Thank you for taking time to consider our plan for this problem resolution.

Sincerely,

Payless Cellular