23/06/2026
Something happened to our business recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
We've been an Airtel corporate customer since 2021. Our team relies on a suite of services under our corporate plan — we pay Airtel lakhs of rupees every month — and for several years, one of those services was a Google collaboration platform that Airtel offered as part of the package.
Over those years, that platform became deeply integrated into how we work. Not in a casual, nice-to-have way. In a serious, operational way — documents, project records, internal communication, client data, business correspondence. Years of it. The kind of institutional knowledge that doesn't exist anywhere else because you built it organically, day after day, trusting that the service would continue to be there.
Last week, that service was disrupted. Without adequate prior notice. Without a migration plan. Without any meaningful conversation with us about what was happening and what we should do.
Teams are disrupted. Work has been affected. We are now spending significant management time and energy dealing with a problem that — with basic communication and planning — could have been completely avoided.
When a service provider allows years of dependency to build up, and accepts lakhs in payments every month from enterprise customers during that time, there is an implicit obligation. Not just contractual. Ethical. You don't get to simply withdraw that service in a way that leaves businesses scrambling.
We are not a small customer who can absorb this quietly. And I suspect we are not alone in this situation.
Airtel is a company I've respected. Their enterprise offering was the reason we consolidated our corporate connections with them. But what has happened here — the absence of notice, the absence of a transition plan, the absence of any senior-level accountability — is a wake-up call about what enterprise customer management actually looks like when it's tested.
I'm sharing this publicly because I believe it's a conversation the business community needs to have.
If large service providers can create years of operational dependency — and then withdraw services without adequate transition planning — what does that mean for every business that has built workflows on top of third-party corporate platforms?
Should there be a higher standard of responsibility here? What has your experience been — as a founder, a CIO, a business owner, or an enterprise customer?
I'd genuinely like to hear from others who've been in this position — and I'd like Airtel's leadership to read this and understand that how a company handles the difficult moments tells you far more about them than how they behave when things are going smoothly.