Telecommunications company Telcel announced Wednesday night that a damaged fiber optic cable caused intermittent service slowdowns and outages in various parts of Mexico during the afternoon.

The company said in a press release that it redirected the traffic through alternate servers, which put increased pressure on the rest of its network.

“Service is gradually returning to normal. Telcel offers an apology for the inconvenience its clients are experiencing because of this,” it said in the statement.

However, many customers reported problems Thursday morning as well, mostly with telephone service.

Customers in several areas of the Mexico City metropolitan area reported poor service and outages throughout the day on Wednesday, as did some in Chihuahua and Nuevo León.

The website Downdetector said millions of users were affected by the outage over the course of seven hours.

Technology experts announced at the beginning of the quarantine period that the increased number of workers switching to a home office would slow but not break the internet in Mexico, but Wednesday’s outage was the fourth such incident this month.

Telcel users had to deal with network failures on May 7, 9 and 20, as well. On those occasions, Telcel’s sister telecommunications company Telmex also had trouble providing its services.

The companies said that the outages were due to damage done to their fiber optic networks by third parties, not server overload.

As of March, Telcel had a total of 77.21 million cellular phone customers, while Temex had 9.79 million home internet clients.

Source: El Economista (sp)