After Latest Outage Swisscom CEO Creates Task Force

(Bloomberg) -- After suffering another major service outage last week, Swisscom AG has created a network stability task force to prevent more breakdowns, CEO Urs Schaeppi said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper.

“There will always be breakdowns,” Schaeppi told SonntagsBlick.

The Swisscom boss said modern telecommunications networks are very complex.

“You can compare it with a wheel change at full speed. We have to intervene in the networks continuously while operations are ongoing,” he said.

Swisscom shares were the worst performers among European telecom shares on May 27, after a Swiss lawmaker said the operator will be asked to explain a series of outages to a parliamentary committee amid doubts about the reliability of its network.

Schaeppi told SonntagsBlick that “society has to learn that our communication systems can do more and more, but failures cannot be ruled out.”

Swisscom suffered a three-hour outage on May 26, on its land-line and mobile networks that impacted business and private customers in Switzerland.

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