Japan demands action on NTT phone disruptions

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(Kyodo News via NewsEdge) Regional phone units of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone said that the latest in a series of service disruptions was caused by a mistake in work involving exchanging hard disks in a hookup device.

The government called for NTT East and NTT West to thoroughly review their trouble-prevention measures.

Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications summoned senior officials from NTT East and NTT West, urging them to conduct a 90-item review of their service systems in order to prevent a recurrence of the problem.

According to the two phone operators, the program for the hookup device for their Internet protocol phone services was partially damaged when the hard disks were changed this week because an engineer of a subcontractor for NTT East mistakenly input data with capital letters instead of lower case.

The damaged program caused the connection equipment to go down Wednesday morning. The backup equipment also failed to operate.

NTT said the group's 'fail-safe functions were insufficient,' admitting lack of a system to prevent input mistakes.

The disruption followed a series of NTT-related troubles, including Japan's worst-ever breakdown of Internet connection services caused by NTT East earlier this month, which affected about 2.4 million of the carrier's subscribers.

© 2007 Kyodo News

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