Mobily blames Saudi Oger for Riyadh telephone breakdown

Mobily has blamed construction company Saudi Oger for the seven hour outage of its services which occurred on Wednesday afternoon.

All Mobily telephone and internet services were unavailable in the Central and Eastern regions of the Kingdom, after two major fibre optic cables were apparently accidentally cut by construction workers.

According to Mobily, two cables, one on King Abdullah road in Riyadh, and another in Khurais, 180 km east of Riyadh were cut by Saudi Oger, which is carrying out road construction works around the capital.

In a statement issued by the company, as reported in Arab News, Humoud Al-Ghobaini, corporate communication manager of Mobily said: "Both cables were core to keeping Mobily's network on air and its customers in touch.

"The outage of Mobily services caused considerable trouble for our eleven million customers across the Kingdom. Regardless of the advance intimation, and the fact that the cables were buried under seven metres of concrete, Saudi Oger cut through the major cables," he added. Mobily say that service was restored by around 9.30pm on Wednesday, although some customers said they still had no service as late as 11.30pm.

Mobily is now understood to be calculating losses from the outage, which it says could run into hundreds of thousands of Riyals, and is considering how best to compensate customers.

Saudi Oger has denied the claims, and said it will counter-sue Mobily if the operator brings action against it.