TRANSPORT group Piston (Pinagkaisang Samahan ng mga Tsuper at Operators Nationwide), progressive alliance Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), and other labor groups launched a nationwide transport strike on the morning of March 19 to protest the unabated oil price increases.
On the night of March 18, schools across Metro Manila decided to shift to online classes the following day to protect students from the disruptions of the scheduled transport strike.
The shift to online classes was a responsible, proactive and student-centered contingency plan. By midnight, it had already been undone, not by the transport strike, but by PLDT.
Most of the PLDT subscribers in the southern part of Metro Manila lost their internet connectivity at midnight of March 19. PLDT sent this message to the affected subscribers at 12:03 a.m.: “We are aware of a service interruption affecting your connection at [subscriber’s number]. Restoring your service is our top priority. Our team is working to resolve it within 24 hours, depending on its nature and the condition of your area. We will keep you updated. Thank you for your patience and understanding.” (As of this writing, 3:45 p.m., service has not been restored).
Students who had been rerouted to online classes to spare them from one disruption found themselves swallowed by another. PLDT bills itself as the country’s leading telecommunications and digital services provider. On March 19, it failed in that aspect.
PLDT’s defective service
The March 19 service interruption was not an isolated case. Subscriber complaints about PLDT outages are a fixture of Philippine online life, documented on social media, crowdsourced on outage-tracking platforms and filed in droves with the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). In fact, this was already the subject of an op-ed column (Raymundo Lo, “Under the Microscope”) published a year ago in another newspaper, but the same things are still happening. The said op-ed described a community where “nary a day passes without someone posting on our village group chat about no phone service, cable TV breakdown, and/or weak internet signals” — and recounted horror stories of phones being out of order for months with no response from PLDT.
Under Philippine law, specifically Republic Act 7925, or the Public Telecommunications Policy Act of 1995, and NTC regulations (e.g., NTC Memorandum Circular 07-07-2011), consumers are entitled to “uninterrupted” service except for scheduled maintenance with prior notice. If outages exceed reasonable durations without justification, this constitutes a breach. NTC Memorandum Circular 05-06-2018 requires internet service providers (ISPs) to notify consumers at least 24 hours in advance for planned outages and to provide alternative solutions. The March 19 outage was unplanned, and subscribers were notified only after it had already begun.
Republic Act 12234, or the Konektadong Pinoy Act, introduced stricter requirements, with failure to meet standards consistently resulting in penalties that may eventually lead to revocation of registration after three years of subpar service. Whether the NTC will pursue this line of accountability in the aftermath of the March 19 outage remains to be seen. Consumer advocates have noted that no major ISP has faced meaningful penalties despite the thousands of complaints filed nationwide.
PLDT’s accountability
A text message is not accountability. “Within 24 hours, depending on its nature and the condition of your area” is not a service commitment — it is a disclaimer. It protects the company’s legal exposure while leaving subscribers with nothing but patience.
Real accountability means transparent, timely communication about what caused the outage, what is being done and when service will realistically be restored. It means automatic service credits — not a complaints process that most subscribers do not know exists or cannot navigate. It means that the NTC, which exists precisely to enforce service standards, stops treating ISP accountability as a matter of consumer initiative and starts treating it as a matter of regulatory duty.
Pending legislation, the “Automatic Refund for Internet and Telecommunications Services Outages and Disruptions Act” (House Bill 00178) is a proposed legislation aimed at ensuring internet service reliability and providing automatic rebates and stiffer penalties for poor service.
There is a credible case to be made that PLDT should be held legally accountable — through civil action filed by affected subscribers, by educational institutions whose academic operations were disrupted, or through proceedings initiated by the state on behalf of the public it is duty-bound to protect. Existing laws hold service providers liable for damages arising from failure to deliver contracted services. A subscriber who paid for internet connectivity and received none — on a day when that connection was, for thousands of students, the only available classroom — has suffered a concrete and documentable injury. A school that responsibly shifted to online learning, only to have its students effectively locked out by an unresolved outage, has legitimate grounds to raise the same concern.
Philippine procedural rules allow affected parties to consolidate such claims, giving collective legal weight to what PLDT might otherwise dismiss as isolated cases. The point of such action is not punitive in spirit but to establish, through the authority of the courts, that internet service has ceased to be a discretionary amenity and must be treated, in law and in practice, as an essential utility — one whose failure carries real consequences for real people, and whose providers cannot be permitted to answer that failure with a form message and a request for patience.
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