December 9, 2022 Administrative Guidance Concerning Appropriate Response to Telecommunications Accident

Today, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) issued a stern warning to Rakuten Mobile, Inc. (headed by YAZAWA Shunsuke, Representative Director and President) regarding a large-scale accident that occurred on September 4, 2022, so as to prevent recurrence of similar accidents. In addition, MIC gave them administrative guidance in writing, instructing them to securely implement various initiatives from the viewpoint of recurrence prevention.

1. Background

On October 4, 2022, MIC received a serious accident report under Article 4 of the Telecommunications Business Act (Act No. 86 of 1984) from Rakuten Mobile, Inc. on the large-scale communication failure they experienced with their mobile phone services on September 4, 2022.
Not only did this failure involve voice transmission services handling emergency calls, but it also resulted in both voice (estimated to have affected approximately 110,000 people) and data (estimated to have affected approximately 1.3 million people) transmission services being difficult to use for 2 hours and 6 minutes. Given that cellphone services are a major part of the infrastructure of daily life for the public, the social impact of this failure is huge.
Such a serious accident is a major disruption to users' interests and seriously affects social and economic activities. Therefore, MIC issued a stern warning to the companies to prevent similar accidents from occurring and gave them administrative guidance in writing from the viewpoint of recurrence prevention.

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