NTT Docomo Inc. said Wednesday a total of over 10 million users faced disruptions to either voice or data communications last month in the nationwide system outage affecting Japan's largest mobile carrier.

In an incident report submitted to the communications ministry on Wednesday, the company said the system failure that began on Oct. 14 affected the voice communications of about 4.6 million people and data communications of about 8.3 million people.

A person in Tokyo holds a smartphone displaying a website of NTT Docomo Inc. informing users about its service disruption on Oct. 14, 2021. (Kyodo)

NTT Docomo had said at the time of the incident that a total of 2 million customers were left with no access at all to voice and data services at one point. It revised that figure down to 1 million in its report.

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Yasushi Kaneko told a press conference that he wants NTT Docomo to "take all possible measures to prevent such incidents from happening again and share the findings from the major glitch with other carriers."

The company said eight executives, including President and CEO Motoyuki Ii, will voluntarily return some of their salary to take responsibility for the system failure, which occurred during work on the carrier's network. It took about 29 hours for services to be fully restored.

Ii will return 20 percent of his monthly executive compensation for one month, the company said.

NTT Docomo said last month the communication failure occurred around 5 p.m. on Oct. 14 after its system responded in an unexpected way during the work on its network, and that data that backed up during the outage overwhelmed the system when the company tried to restore services.


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