A number of businesses in the Peppergrove Mall were left in turmoil after phone and internet connections ceased to work on Thursday morning.
A number of businesses in the Peppergrove Mall were left in turmoil after phone and internet connections ceased to work on Thursday morning.
“No one knew for a long time what was going on”, says James Jepp, an owner of the InTouch IT shop in Peppergrove. He was later told that municipal workers, working on the road in African Street, had damaged an underground Telkom line.
The financial manager of Pick n Pay, Rosy Walker, says credit card services were down but were quickly put on a backup line. They suffered no losses, she said, but could not place any orders and were unable to pay their accounts.
She reported the problem to Telkom, only to be told that they were working on it. Another business in Peppergrove reportedly did not suffer any direct losses, but Pierre van Niekerk, a sales consultant at MTN, said it was chaos at work as they were unable to contact their other branches.
The Casablanca Florist was fortunately unaffected. The owner, Naas Ferreira said their phone lines and internet were both still working. He did say, however, that if it had ben off then they could have lost a great deal of business seeing as most of their orders are done over the telephone.
Some shops' phone and internet lines were still offline at the close of the business day on Friday.
