Pelephone Rules Out Cyberattack- Class Action Filed

In what must be one of the fastest class-action filings ever, on Monday a law firm in Israel filed a NIS 450 million class-action against cellular phone company Pelephone for a four hour service outage that ended at 11 PM Sunday night. The JPost reported that the suit was filed on behalf of one Tom Lifshitz requesting "NIS 100 in damages and NIS 50 in emotional damages, citing the fact that mobile communications are an integral part of daily life and their absence left him unable to make personal or work-related calls, leaving him feeling 'helpless.'"

My wife was trying to call some people who use Pelephone yesterday and noticed that she could not get through. It was frustrating for her and it must have been even more frustrating for Israelis who have Pelephone as a provider, but a class action suit. Really? Emotional distress because your phone didn't work for four hours? Do you think this is the United States? If a car hit a power line and knocked out power to a whole city would that be grounds for a class action? I doubt it. I understand that people rely on their cellphones, sometimes to the exclusion of landlines but it doesn't seem like this is something that you can really sue for. You have to expect that even in our advanced technological age their will be some episodes of downtime every once in a while due to unforeseen circumstances. Besides, Pelephone is offering to compensate people with free minutes or data. That should probably be sufficient, instead of NIS 150 for each affected customer.

Oh, and totally coincidentally, I think we are switching to Pelephone tomorrow because we got a good deal for international calls and an American phone number on our cell phones and home phone. The recent outage gave me some pause, but not enough.