July 26 (NBD) -- Early Monday morning, quite a lot of users of China Mobile, one of the three major telecom operators in China, were shocked to find that they ran up a huge phone bill, and phone call and network connection services were both unavailable.  

It is noticed on Sina Weibo that most affected users are in Southwest China's Sichuan province and the largest single phone bill to be paid reached as high as 1.2 million yuan (177,352 U.S. dollars).

Believing it was a system failure, many netizens posted their screenshots on the Internet to vie with each other to see who owed the most. Some joked they had never found they were so wealthy, while some said their houses became the property of the telecom company overnight. Also, there were some netizens such as businessmen expressing anger on the website over losses caused by the incident.

A phone out of service is nothing more than a brick, especially for people who are used to make payments with their phones and don't have cash on them. 

When contacted by NBD, a worker with China Mobile said the company has noticed the abnormal billing issue but it is still not clear how serious the issue is.

The carrier's Sichuan branch later announced via its official account on Sina Weibo that abnormal bills were a temporary failure caused by system upgrading. They apologized for the inconvenience and promised to get the bill query system back to normal within 24 hours. 

As of press time, most affected phones have resumed services.

Email: tanyuhan@nbd.com.cn