Digicel Haiti apologised to its customers on October 5 after a major outage over the weekend of October 4–5. According to the operator's statement, written in Creole and reported by local media, projectiles damaged two international fibre-optic cables along Route Nationale 1.
‼️ MIZAJOU SOU REZO A ‼️
Repairs slowed by insecurity
Insecurity along the route slowed the technical teams' access to the damaged cables. Repairs were eventually completed, and Digicel thanked its technicians and customers for their patience.
Compensation
Digicel promised affected customers personalised compensation messages. It has not published the amounts or who qualifies.
Some subscribers told local media they went close to 48 hours without a connection, and that data bundles they had paid for expired during the outage before they could use them.
A fragile backbone
The incident is a concrete reminder of how vulnerable Haiti's connectivity infrastructure is. International traffic depends on a small number of fibre routes, and when one is damaged in an area teams cannot safely reach, phone and internet service suffer across the country. Digicel has reported similar cuts on Route Nationale 1 before, along with compensation offers afterwards.
