Lebanon has suffered a spate of telecoms outages. (Credit: Michel Hallak/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — Residents of Baysour, a town in the Aley area southeast of Beirut, have called on authorities to take action to end a telecoms outage that has seen mobile phone and internet services go down.
Here’s what we know:
• Baysour residents have cried foul that all landline and mobile phone services have been cut for two days after the Telecommunications Ministry “failed to secure fuel” to operate a telecoms station servicing the area, the NNA reported.
• Lebanon has suffered from a spate of growing telecoms outages localized to areas across the country. On Jan. 10, residents of the Nabatieh area in South Lebanon Monday lost all services from the Alfa and Touch mobile telephone networks.
• In 2021, generator fuel made up 7 percent of the telecommunication sector’s budget allocation, Reuters reported on Jan. 12, with this figure expected to rise to two-thirds of its budget.
• Telecommunications Minister Johnny Corm said in an interview with Reuters that he was not optimistic about the prospects for improving the internet interruptions and poor mobile phone signals in Lebanon.
• “We are in crisis management mode without being able to look at all at long-term problems or see what the overall solutions are because we're distracted by daily matters,” the minister said.