By Latrishka Thomas
The over 25,000 customers who depend on the Antigua Public Utilities Authority’s (APUA’s) landline service was left “in the dark” for an extended period of time yesterday.
Vaughn Brown, Telecommunications Manager of the Authority, apologised on behalf of the company saying, “I certainly want to apologise to our customers for the interruption in service they experienced [yesterday].
“We would have gone at great lengths to ensure that something like this should not happen.”
He explained that usually, “if one unit fails something else should have taken over but for some reason that did not happen”.
However, APUA is working to ensure that this will not happen again, he assured.
Brown said that they were notified of the outage which affected all landlines and some mobile services at around 7 am yesterday.
They then “looked at the system and noticed an excess amount of traffic going across the system” but we’re not sure where that came from.
To rectify the issue, they then had to stabilise the traffic and then get it back up and running again.
Up until 5 pm yesterday when Observer spoke to the telecommunications head, 200 more lines needed to be reconnected.
However, Brown said that they still do not know the root cause of the problem but an external body is working to find the answer and that may take weeks.
He assured the public nonetheless that APUA will be working vigorously to ensure that such an interference does not occur again.