“The taxi services were affected for about 3 hours impacting our services at Hamad International Airport (HIA) and resulted in shortage of taxi availability serving the arriving passengers. This was due to a technical snag in the main server,” Mowasalat said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Mowasalat management immediately advised ITC to take necessary actions to solve the issue, and operations to adopt contingency plan to advise taxi drivers on duty to continue beyond working hours until the issue is settled, the shortage is covered and the system disruption is recovered.
"Mowasalat management also instructed taxi operations to continue manual shift allocation out of the dispatch system for taxis to serve customers and ensure availability on the streets, vantage points and to meet with the shortage at HIA.”
According to Mowasalat, the technical snag and system failure disrupted taxi services only for a few hours and the system was up and running by noon on both July 18 and 19. After the problem was solved the taxi dispatch system and service through call centre and taxi application was resumed.
The company ensured that taxis were operating and attending to customers through manual dispatch system and allocation procedure.
“While necessary actions are being taken to get the system up and running normal, at the earliest, we would like to add that this technical snag has not in any way visibly affected our servicing the customers while booking through call centre, allocation, dispatching and reaching customer’s doorstep and our services remain uninterrupted.
"Our taxi operations have very quickly meted out steps to ensure that our customers are not put to any hardship or delay and smooth services resumed in less than three hours. In Mowasalat, we realise our responsibility in serving the public to iron out swiftly issues in order to ensure our services are not hampered and affect our customers in their daily commutation,” the statement added.