AIRPORT--Travellers at Princess Juliana International Airport SXM were caught by surprise on Tuesday when part of the airport’s computer systems went down suddenly after 10:00am. A contractor damaged a fibre optic cable in the Cole Bay area, causing an interruption in service between mobile customers of TelCell and its French-side counterparts Dauphin Telecom and Orange.
Banks in the area and other high-end businesses also were affected by the outage.
Travellers were frustrated, as they had to wait in long lines to get checked in manually. The Daily Herald tried to reach Airport management for comment on the situation but questions went unanswered by Marketing Manager Suzy Kartokromo.
The outages lasted eight hours and two minutes, according to TelEm Group Network Operations Manager Julien Lake. Service was fully restored at 4:30pm. TelEm Group apologised to customers for the interruption in service, which was beyond the company’s control.
TelEm’s Chief Executive Officer Kendall Dupersoy said in an invited comment that the company is working on a backup system that should be in place within six weeks to minimise situations like this.
