Saudi Oger cutting Mobily’s fiberoptic cables behind outage

Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) apologized to customers in a statement issued early Thursday morning over an outage Wednesday afternoon (July 16, 2008) in the Central and Eastern regions.

Saudi Oger was behind the outage as it cut a major cable of Mobily’s fiberoptic cables –  on King Abdullah road in Riyadh, whereas the second cut was in Khurais, 180 kilometers east of Riyadh.

Both cables are core to keeping Mobily’s network on air and its customers in touch. In the statement, Mobily said the outage had impacted its customers across the Kingdom.

Mobily said it had provided detailed maps and diagrams of where its cables were to Saudi Oger before-hand. Regardless of these preparations, and the fact that the cables were buried under seven meters of concrete, Saudi Oger cut through the major cable and caused the outage.

Mobily said that it would find ways to guard against outages caused by similar actions from other contractors in the future.
 Meanwhile, the outage lasted for almost seven hours through Wednesday afternoon.

Mobily rushed its network operations team immediately after the cables were cut. The team worked round the clock and was able to restore service Wednesday night, with customers getting service back from 9:30 PM onwards.

 

Jul 17, 2008