Cut off from the outside world

By Jennie Matthew

CYPRUS was isolated from the world at the weekend, after someone opened the floodgates on a village dam and thousands of tonnes of water gushed down the hill and flooded a Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CyTA) sub- station.

A full-scale administrative and police investigation is currently under way to determine the extent of the damage, said deputy manager of CyTA Photis Savvides, who refused to disclose the precise location of the centre.

The Authority is now coping with a full clean-up operation, while the total cost of damages has yet to be calculated.

People were up in arms all weekend, unable to call friends and relatives abroad, frustrated by a ” network busy”message.

Neither were callers in other countries able to dial through to Cyprus numbers, fixed as well as mobile.

And with CyTA’s 132 customer service helpline keeping a normal working week, it was impossible for subscribers to get a clear picture of the problem.

” Of course we had a lot of complaints because for a long time people couldn’t communicate with the outside world,”said Savvides.

Some 100 engineers worked through the weekend to free up connections, starting with lines to Greece and the UK, where the vast majority of foreign traffic is dialled.

” Greece and the UK was the first route to be restored, but because only a few lines were available, they quickly became congested,”the deputy manager added.

By yesterday, 72 per cent of international dial destinations were connectable and all national lines were back in service.

Savvides said that of the 180 or so foreign countries, only five or six were still unreachable yesterday, such as Latvia or Columbia where the traffic was low.

The leftover problems will be tackled today.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.