Net outage leads to unpaid bills

MONDAY’S disruptions to Internet connectivity offered by Telecom Namibia had a significant effect on individuals and businesses making use of Internet banking.

Telecom Namibia says ‘a hardware failure’ was to blame for the national Internet outage.Telecom technicians were able to stabilise the system late on Monday night and are now trying to find a lasting solution to prevent a recurrence.When asked whether similar disruptions were expected in the future, Telecom Namibia public relations officer Surihe Gaomas said they were ‘working hard to prevent the future occurrence of such problems’.Emile van Zyl, research director of Simonis Storm Securities, said the most significant effect would be to those who rely on Internet banking to make account payments. ‘Seeing as the disruption came on the last day of the month, it is likely that many people will not have been able to make their account payments in time. The result of this is that many people will accrue interest on late payments,’ Van Zyl said.Daniel Motinga, senior manager for research and development at FNB, said because the disruption came on the last day of the month, and due to the high volume of financial transactions taking place, there was sure to be an effect on economic activity. He said it was unlikely that the outage would have had as much impact on larger businesses as on smaller ones. Motinga said since the disruption was restricted to a single day, it is unlikely to have had a huge economic impact.