A small percentage of MTN cellphone users were charged twice for SMSs (short message service) between December and February, the company said on Tuesday.

MTN's Lesley Briggs said a system error caused some SMSs not to appear on the accounts of certain of their contract clients. When the missing records were found, customers' accounts were updated, with some customers being charged twice.

The duplication checking system did not pick up the error, as the files were more than a week old.

Yvonne Muthien of MTN corporate affairs said the error had been rectified and billing procedures further reinforced to prevent a recurrence.

'We sincerely regret this incident'

"We are now running the billing procedure again on our recovery system using clean data. The bills this generates will then be compared with the original bills in order to calculate the correct refunds to customers. This complex but necessary procedure is expected to be completed towards the end of March. Those customers affected will be credited with refunds in the next billing run," said Muthien.

Pre-paid customers were not affected.

Briggs said the company had not finished processing all the clients cases and therefore could not comment on how many had been affected by the error. She did say it was under 10 percent.

As a result of the glitch, MTN experienced a flood of calls from customers. Customers had to wait between 20 minutes to an hour before their calls were answered.

Roy Page, also of MTN corporate affairs, said the response times were not normal. He said calls were queued and response times were closely monitored. Under normal circumstances, customers would be attended to "almost immediately".

"We sincerely regret this incident as we pride ourselves on our record of excellent customer service," said Muthien. - Sapa

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