March 26 – Duplicate monthly renewal charges

Some customers with monthly renewals of phone numbers and Premium due today have been charged several times due to a technical error.

10 AM UTC. The multiple renewal charges were caused by a new module in our Billing engine which was taken into production earlier this week.

The new Billing engine module has been developed in preparation for the launch of our cheaper and optional 1-year and 3-year subscriptions for phone numbers that are being made available to customers early April and that allows for substantially reduced monthly costs.

An unexpected slowness in our database early today morning caused the new billing engine module to start processing renewals repeatedly, while the prior attempts had not been complemented yet due to the unexpected database slowness.

We have rigorous testing procedures in place for all new modules, but the extreme database slowness was unfortunately not a scenario that was taken into account.

The Billing engine module has now been changed to avoid this type of issues moving forward and we are investigating the root cause of the database slowness.

We have refunded the incorrect renewal charges for phone numbers and will do the same for incorrectly charged Premium renewals shortly. For some customers that are subject to VAT, we will also refund the VAT portion of the incorrect charges separately during the coming hours.

Some customers have also had their Sonetel prepaid accounts auto-refilled due to the incorrect renewal charges. We will manually repay any such auto-refill charges during the day. Please note that repayments to Credit cards may take a few days before they show up on your credit card bill.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Although the cause of this problem has been identified and resolved, we will do further investigations to see if we can improve our processes further moving forward, to avoid any similar events from occurring in the future.

Please note that we in some cases may be applying the refund before the incorrect monthly renewal charges reaches the Sonetel account. This is due to the fact that the charges reach the customer account with some delay.

11 AM UTC.  All incorrect monthly charges – including VAT – have now been refunded to the affected customers.
The refund will carry the description “Refund issued for billing error- 26-March-2016” while the separate refund of VAT will carry the description “VAT – Refund issued for billing error- 26-March-2016“.

You can find the transactions by signing in at sonetel.com, and by going to Billing and Monthly Statements. By clicking on the current month, and requesting to see the Details, you can see all charges. Please note that you may need to allow pop-up windows, as these may be blocked by your browser.

We will now start the process of repaying incorrect auto-refill charges.