What was the reason behind Monday’s Internet outage in Lebanon?

The call centers of Alfa and Touch, the two mobile-phone operators in Lebanon received 1,200,000 phone calls between 7 and 10:30 pm on Monday, asking for the reason behind the interruption of the internet service. However, they only managed to answer 35,000 of these calls.      

For three and half hours, thousands of Lebanese Internet users faced major disruption to their service for no clear reason, which caused a hubbub.     

In this regard, the office of the Minister of Telecommunications Nicolas Sehnaoui announced that maintenance work carried out on the I-ME-WE cable system in Marseille caused this outage.     
In a phone call with LBCI, Sehnaoui held the telecommunications company Ogero responsible for this disruption, considering it to be an “irresponsible act”. He added that the government must take the necessary measures and punish the perpetrators.       

For its Part, Ogero said that in virtue of a cabinet decision issued six months ago, the cabinet is supposed to be given notice of maintenance dates in order to inform Ogero and the citizens.