The Digicel mobile phone network failed for at least two hours on Wednesday.
According the company’s commercial director, Brian Hurley, Digicel experienced “a power failure that caused a temporary service disruption on the network.” The network went down around 4:30 p.m. According to emails sent to users by Digicel, the service had been restored to many of its customers by 6:40 p.m. and full service was expected to be restored shortly thereafter.
Mr. Hurley said Digicel was “able to quickly identify the cause and started to implement a fix immediately to get the network back up and running.”
Officials say the outage did not affect calls to 911 calls. Last month, a six-hour outage of the LIME system led to calls to 911 not going through to the emergency services.
“To our knowledge, there was no impact,” said the Department of Public Safety and Communications’ Brent Finster of Wednesday’s outage.
He added, “We tested calls to 911 from both Digicel and LIME phones, while the outage was happening, and the tests went through. We received no information from anyone that they had a problem reaching 911.”
The regulator of communications networks, the Information and Communications Technology Authority, confirmed Thursday that the disruption affected Digicel’s voice and data services.
Russell Richardson, head of licensing and compliance at the ICTA, said the authority was seeking further information relating to the outage.
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This just goes to show that Digicel is no more immune to network failures than LIME.