An Internet outage on Thursday, 31 August caused internet disruptions for customers of Tonga Communications Corporation (TCC), who were unable to access websites such as Google, Gmail and Yahoo and also experienced slow connections.

TCC CEO, Sione Veikoso told Matangi Tonga on Friday that the reason was due to a specific outage from an overseas internet service provider.

“Our link provider is Tonga Cable Ltd and their internet service provider, based in Australia, experienced problems outside of our control.”

He said the issue was “the uplink capacity of the provider.”

Mr Veikoso was alerted of the outage via email on the day at 9.37am and another email was sent to him again at 5.57pm advising that the problem was fixed.

“They switched it to another path which took time to recover.”

He said TCC customers that were impacted could not access certain websites such as Google, Gmail and Yahoo.

Other issues

Although the outage was fixed last week, slow internet connection was experienced by some businesses over the last few days could also be caused by other issues.

Sione said it could be a landline, network or the capacity issue, but in most cases, problems customers experience are with the landline.

Meanwhile, Tonga’s other major telecommunications service provider, Digicel Tonga’s CEO, Ben Kealy said they did not experience any issues.

“We are business as usual. We have seen no drop in our services.”