Millions lost “the other part of their brain” when their smartphones and computers went blank in the Dominican Republic on Thursday, 21 March 2019. The loss of service upset many businesses, including lottery sales points and banking activity. Billings and credit card purchases were also affected.
Later in the afternoon, Claro Dominicana telecommunications confirmed there had been a “nationwide interruption” that day starting at around
The company sent out a note on its Twitter account at 2:41 p.m. on Thursday, 21 March saying: “We report to our clients that Internet service has been reestablished. Initially, there might be some slowness in the connections. Thank you for your understanding.”
Claro reported that excavations on the highway expansion project between Puerto Plata and Santiago had accidentally cut two fiber optic lines causing the Internet collapse. The cuts occurred on the stretches Navarrete-Puerto Plata and Puerto Plata-Nagua.
Claro social media posts indicated that the second line cut represented redundancy circuits, and was the final cause of the interruption of service.
Users of Altice Internet service were also affected by the outage.
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El Nacional
El Nacional
25 March 2019