DAMMAM — Confusion and frustration prevailed in the Eastern Province as Saudi Telephone Company's (STC) network completely collapsed on Thursday disabling all mobile and landline phones and for a few hours cutting off the region with the rest of the world. There were no means to reach STC officials to find out the reason and status as no telephone or mobile calls were materializing. The outage came around 11.53 a.m. when all the signals suddenly snapped throwing communication to total collapse. Interestingly other mobile networks were functioning normally. Connectivity of mobile and landline phones was restored at 2.43 p.m. During the outage, on pressing any number on the cellular phone, a message appeared on the screen which read: "Mobile network not available”. And in some it read: "Not registered on network.” The problem was not restricted to cellular phone signals but also to the landlines. Calling any landline number or mobile number gave a perpetual busy tone. Interestingly Internet that went off for few minutes, returned to normalcy in just 15 minutes but has been functioning erratically, with only certain areas getting connected. The breakdown has completely affect entire business and personal life. All major corporate and business houses reported a complete stoppage of work. “The loss will be in millions and millions of riyals,” commented a member of the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “It is a total collapse of business. We are cut off from the rest of the world. The only silver lining is that other networks are functioning and Internet is operative which is erratic and extremely slow,” said a petrochemical company executive in Dammam Industrial Area-II. Fahd Ibn Abdul Rahman, operations manager in a corporate, said his company was absolutely disconnected and incurred huge losses as many transactions got bogged down. Tomorrow and day after being non-working days, it is going to be alarmingly huge loss.” Sarfraz Mohammad, in charge of purchase in a trading company in Al-Khobar, was extremely frustrated as he was to contact his family for some extremely urgent reasons at definite hours and could not do so. Rahmatullah Khan, a Pakistani business executive, said that he felt like dead. “This is the problem of dependency on technology. We have become so dependent on technology that we could not think of a life without them. My office's entire system has collapsed,” he said. Saudi Gazette tried to visit the headquarters of STC office in Dammam, but was not allowed in the premises.
