Russia’s Megafon settles dispute with HP over system failure

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Megafon, Russia’s second biggest mobile phone operator, has reached an out-of-court settlement with U.S. firm Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co over system failures in its IT network, the firm told Reuters on Friday.

The dispute was settled in July and the lawsuit terminated, a Megafon representative said, but refused to disclose further details. Hewlett Packard confirmed the settlement.

Megafon filed a lawsuit in California in 2018, seeking seven times what it paid for IT services in damages after system failures caused network outages in 2016 and 2017.

The mobile operator paid around $28 million for Hewlett Packard’s services. Hewlett Packard at the time rejected the charges and promised to defend itself “strongly”.

(Reporting by Nadezhda Tsydenova; writing by Alexander Marrow; editing by Katya Golubkova and Jason Neely)