A Liberty mobile spokesman said Sunday that a service outage two days earlier that affected customers’ ability to call 911, was caused by “interconnection issues which we believe affected all carriers.”
Customers with cellular phone service through Liberty suffered a major outage Friday, but the company has blamed an unnamed third party and declined to explain what, specifically, caused the outage.
The VI Territorial Emergency Management Agency issued a public notice about the outage, but Liberty representatives did not make any effort to alert their customers to the problem, and have not posted any public statements on their social media page or website.
Liberty USVI general manager Bala Balakrishnan responded to questions from The Daily News with a brief statement Friday: “A third-party outage this morning affected the ability of Liberty mobile customers to make calls to some landline numbers. Mobile to mobile calls, texts and data continued working as usual. The situation has been fixed. We regret any inconvenience.”
Balakrishnan did not respond to subsequent questions about which third party caused the outage, or whether the outage is likely to reoccur.
On Sunday morning, Liberty spokesperson Tommy Dardet apologized in a text message for not responding to follow-up questions.
“It is not our style. Liberty is very open, responsive, and fast when it comes to answering questions from the media. Unfortunately, this was one of those rare instances where we were limited to respond because of contractual third-party agreements,” Dardet wrote.
“What we could tell you is basically what we had said — there was not an outage in our network. Mobile to mobile, texts, data, everything was normal. There were interconnection issues which we believe affected all carriers,” Dardet wrote.
The Daily News asked if Liberty investigated whether any of its customers were unable to access emergency services as a result of the outage.
Dardet replied that the company is “taking this situation very seriously because we know how important it is to be able to connect to 911. This is an ongoing investigation which will take some time, as soon as we have more information, we will get back to you.”
VITEMA spokesperson Erik Ackerson said Friday that the outage began at around 4:30 am and continued for approximately eight to nine hours.
When VITEMA contacted Liberty representatives, “all they said was that they had a service failure,” Ackerson said.
At no point was the 911 system itself affected, Ackerson said, and customers were still able to call for help via landlines and other cell carriers, including T-Mobile.
In an effort to ensure that Liberty customers could still access emergency services, Ackerson said he posted a list of alternate phone numbers, and messages about the issue were publicized via the VI Alert system.
Ackerson said there were initial indications that Viya customers may also have been affected, and Luis Hospital on St. Croix published a notice on Facebook that Viya customers were having trouble getting through to the hospital’s phone lines.
Viya spokeswoman Jennifer Matarangas-King said Viya’s landline and mobile network did not suffer from any outages, but Viya customers had difficulty reaching Liberty customers, which initially caused confusion about which carrier was having issues.
She said there are situations where a third party outage could cause problems for multiple carriers, such as when a utility crew accidentally cuts a data line.
But in a phone call Sunday, Matarangas-King said that “we did all of our research” and determined that Viya customers were not impacted.
“There have been situations where there is a third party that can affect everyone, that was not the case on Friday,” she said. “If that were the case, everyone would have been down, but we were not, we were fully functional” and “Viya customers either calling on a landline or calling on their mobile had no problem getting through to 911.”
In response to questions from The Daily News, Government House Communications Director Richard Motta Jr. said Friday that it was “a fluid situation and facts are still being gathered as to the extent of the outage and its impact. We will share more information as we learn more.”
Motta could not be reached Sunday for additional comment on Liberty’s claim that all carriers were affected by the “interconnection issues.”
.