Indian Oil Corporation’s Indane cooking gas booking and delivery system is on course to normalcy after an outage, with officials and LPG distributors on Wednesday saying that many households were able to place order for refills as usual.
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Though there was no official update, after Tuesday’s statement in which the national oil marketing company said that Indane LPG booking and delivery system managed by IBM India had experienced an outage for the last two days, sources said that restoration work was likely to be completed by Thursday.
Nearly 70-80% of Indane households that tried to order LPG refills over the IVRS, met with success, some after multiple attempts, said a cooking gas distributors’ association leader in Telangana. Confirming the same, sources among IOC officials said that the situation is expected to improve.
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The oil major had in the statement on the outage said that the system is under recovery. Addressing customers, it said by Wednesday evening, the issue was likely to be resolved “so that we can service your calls as usual from tomorrow.” According to sources, the outage happened after one of the servers crashed on Saturday when a software patching work was undertaken.
It led to customers not able to book cooking gas refill over the IVRS and many rushing to the distributorships.
While stating work to restore the system at the earliest was underway, IOC had advised customers to continue to make booking through SMS or IVRS number 77189 55555; missed call facility 84549 55555; WhatsApp 75888 88824; and through their distributors directly or reach out to the showroom phone lines displayed on cash memo as well. Sources said in doing so the oil company had delinked the bookings, until the server issue was resolved.
To help customers in rural areas tide over the situation and ensure cooking gas cylinder supplies, a few Indane distributors in Telangana sent out messages through the Sarpanch of Gram Panchayats. Since the delivery boys in rural areas know customers better and have their numbers, messages were sent out to customers on WhatsApp groups, a distributor said.
According to IOC officials, there are a little over 59 lakh Indane customers and more than 350 distributors in Telangana.