MyAdhan Blog

Link: Internet outage hits Yemen

An internet outage affecting all internet users swept across Yemen last Saturday. The outage started at 11 a.m. Sana’a local time; 8 a.m. GMT. The outage severely affected the media and journalists that depend on the internet in their daily work as a means of communication or for publishing their news on websites. Ishtar Fuad, communications officer at the Yemen Observer said she kept trying to update the website from 11 am to 7 pm but couldn’t. “We have high speed internet service, ADSL, but the internet was so slow that I couldn’t even open a page,” said Ishtar. The outage caused big losses for the owners of internet cafes across the country. “Many customers tried to get access to the internet but could not, so they left without paying,” said Gamal Abdullah, owner of an internet café on al-Tahreer street in downtown Sana’a. “I have 45 computers which are usually occupied by internet users 24 hours [a day]. The rent of shops in downtown Sana’a is very expensive, so this outage represented a big loss for me,” said Abdullah. Ahmad al-Shahithi, an internet user, said he tried for almost 4 hours to send an email to his brother in Cairo, but failed. “ I could not even open my email. I tried four different internet cafes in different areas of Sana’a but could not get access to my email,” said al-Shahithi. Sami Taher, a journalist, said he could not send his news story and pictures to his newspaper. ”I tried to send the story and pictures from my home but could not, at first I thought it was a virus infecting my laptop that I could not open my email or any internet page, but when I tried to do that from other internet accesses I realized there was something wrong with the internet provider.