Melita outage hits 500 households in Balzan

Connecting to the internet or watching television has been difficult for Melita users in certain areas of Balzan over the last 24 hours, with the locality hit by a major outage in a node in the telecoms company’s network.

The issues, which began shortly before noon on Monday (yesterday), affected customers in Birbal Str., St Francis Str., and F.X. Zahra Str., among others, hitting around 500 households.

A Facebook Group for Balzan residents has seen multiple posts and dozens of comments, with Melita users expressing frustration at the long duration of the outage.

In comments made to BusinessNow.mt, a Melita spokesperson said that its technical team was on the site by Monday late afternoon, shortly after it received notice of the fault.

The team was back on site at 5am on Tuesday morning, with a fix finally being found shortly after 11am.

The faulty hardware has been repaired, and connection should be restored to the Balzan community, said the spokesperson.

They added that the equipment in question will be replaced in an operation scheduled to take place tonight, after midnight, to limit its impact on customers.

The company urged anyone experiencing issues throughout Tuesday afternoon to contact its customer service. If problems persist, it will bring the scheduled replacement forward.

Melita also apologised for the inconvenience, stating: “We strive to avoid all faults, and do our best to address any that arise in the shortest timeframe possible. In this case, the issue proved difficult to fix and persisted for much longer than expected, and for that, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers.”