A COMPUTER glitch which was still unresolved up to last night at a major telephone exchange wiped out phone landline services for up to 60,000 subscribers in Co Mayo.
Acknowledging the “significant impact of the disruption”, Eircom promised in a statement at teatime to continue working through the night to restore the service.
Business in the region was dealt a severe blow by the breakdown which, according to Eircom, has been caused by a “software issue” at the Castlebar exchange.
In the early morning, landline phones went silent across a large part of Mayo, including the major towns of Castlebar, Ballina, Ballyhaunis, Ballinrobe and Charlestown, as well as outlying rural areas.
One potentially serious effect of the outage was that the public found it difficult to contact the Garda. However, the Pulse system, which has headquarters in Castlebar, wasn’t affected and neither was the 999 emergency service. In shops, supermarkets and retail outlets customers could not use their Laser cards because the system depends on a landline connection.
As the outage continued, people tried to get around the problem by using mobile phones, but so many did this that the network was frequently overloaded. It was impossible to ring a landline in the 094 area – the zone most affected by the breakdown – from a mobile.