{"id":206485,"date":"2015-07-10T22:48:40","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T12:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=206485"},"modified":"2015-07-10T22:48:40","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T12:48:40","slug":"massive-outage-catches-capital-hill-by-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/massive-outage-catches-capital-hill-by-surprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Massive outage catches Capital Hill by surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Government offices on Capital Hill were caught by surprise yesterday by a massive communications outage although the impact seems to be minimal.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_206486\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-206486\" style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a attid=\"206486\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Outage-pix.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Outage-pix-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"From left, IT&amp;E executives Vhelma Palacios, head of engineering; Fred Hill, regulatory compliance officer; Rose Soledad, managing director; and Hans Mickelson, Sales and Marketing manager, seated at the back, give an update to the CNMI government regarding repair works on a damaged undersea fiber optic cable. (Joel D. Pinaroc)\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-206486\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-206486\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left, IT&#038;E executives Vhelma Palacios, head of engineering; Fred Hill, regulatory compliance officer; Rose Soledad, managing director; and Hans Mickelson, Sales and Marketing manager, seated at the back, give an update to the CNMI government regarding repair works on a damaged undersea fiber optic cable. (Joel D. Pinaroc)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A staff at the Legislature said the Internet outage did not have a major impact on operations. Documents had to be hand-delivered within the different offices because the e-mail system was down, the staff said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe cannot upload some documents, but the impact was only minimal, because the landlines are still working,\u201d a staff disclosed.<\/p>\n<p>Communication lines, including mobile phone calls and Internet access, broke down early Wednesday effectively isolating Saipan from the rest of the world.<\/p>\n<p>The outage has yet to be fully resolved as of yesterday, as repair works on a damaged undersea fiber optic cable being used by service provider IT&#038;E continue.<\/p>\n<p>The repair is expected to last for months, although a backup microwave system is expected to restore some of the basic services, according to IT&#038;E.<\/p>\n<p>Rep. Francis Taimanao (Ind-Saipan) said the first thing he noticed was the lack of mobile phone services from IT&#038;E.<\/p>\n<p>Taimanao said IT&#038;E gave an advisory regarding the outage, but did not give other details.<\/p>\n<p>Taimanao, who heads the House Committee on Public Utilities, Transportation, and Communications, said he also immediately convened committee members.<\/p>\n<p>IT&#038;E was also invited by Taimanao\u2019s office to give an update and what contingency plans the service provider can offer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201dOur employees were caught by surprise, although this is not the first time that there were service disruptions,\u201d Taimanao said.<\/p>\n<p>It turned out that the outage was anything but ordinary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Government offices on Capital Hill were caught by surprise yesterday by a massive communications outage&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":206486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5970,3781,3732,5971],"class_list":["post-206485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-fred-hill","tag-hans-mickelson","tag-rose-soledad","tag-vhelma-palacios"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}