A Massive Fire Broke Out At A Telecommunications Center In Egypt And Paralyzed The Country For A Day
The fire, likely caused by an electrical short circuit, broke out on Monday, July 7, on the seventh floor of the Ramses Central telecommunications building in a room housing vital technical equipment and cables.
A major fire in a telecommunications center in Egypt has killed four people, disrupting all communications services and paralyzing life in Cairo for more than a day.
The fire, likely caused by an electrical short circuit, broke out on Monday, July 7, on the seventh floor of the Ramses Central telecommunications building in a room housing vital technical equipment and cables.
The center is the most important communications center in Egypt, controlling a large portion of international communications traffic between Egypt and the world and is the meeting point of all networks that carry communications traffic within Egypt.
The fire lasted for several hours and reignited several times during the day despite firefighters and civil defense teams’ efforts to contain it, killing four engineers working at the building who were trying to put out the fire and injuring 27 others.
It also led to widespread outages in mobile, landline and internet services across Cairo and beyond, with national internet connectivity dropping to about 62% of normal levels at the peak of the crisis.
The disruption also affected critical services such as digital banking, online payments, ATM machines, air traffic operations, and the Egyptian stock exchange had to shut down trading on Tuesday, July 8.
People were stranded in places with no communications, money, with some people not even aware of what was happening, disrupting people’s movement within Cairo for hours.
Egypt’s Minister of Communications said that the Ramses building would remain out of service for days due to damage.
Egyptian authorities said that communications would be fully restored within 24 hours.
The incident has sparked widespread criticism from the public about the fragility of Egypt’s infrastructure.
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