By Dave Sherwood
HAVANA (Reuters) -Cuba’s telecoms company ETECSA said on Wednesday that it had begun to restore cellular service following an outage that appeared to impact various parts of the capital Havana and outlying provinces.
“Mobile data services are beginning to return to normal,” ETECSA said on social media. “However, high levels of congestion are being observed for voice calls and SMS messages. Work continues to fully restore services.”
ETECSA did not immediately specify the reason for the outage.
The incident comes as Cuba suffers daily rolling blackouts that have brought the Communist-run nation’s economy to a near standstill. Dire shortages of food, fuel and medicine have also complicated life on the island, prompting a record-breaking exodus to the United States since 2020.
The blackouts, which often contribute to poor cellphone service for hours each day, made it difficult to immediately gauge the extent of the cellular outages on Wednesday.
But several provinces as well as Havana have reported service issues in recent hours.
The Communist Party newspaper Giron, in Matanzas province east of Havana, reported issues with cellular and data coverage on Tuesday following a problem at a local power generation plant. It was unclear if that smaller outage was linked to the broader outages reported on Wednesday.
Reuters confirmed with more than a dozen people across Havana that cellphone service was limited or unavailable across several neighborhoods of the capital.
Havana resident Niruka Centelles said she had visited ETECSA’s offices on Wednesday shortly after noticing that her cell phone appeared not to be working.
“They told me it was a general issue,” she said. “And while I was (at their offices) service was re-established.”
(Reporting by Dave Sherwood in Havana; Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta and Mario Fuentes; Editing by Nick Zieminski, Rod Nickel and Mark Porter)
