MOGADISHU — Somalia has restored its internet connection after repairing a severed undersea cable, a telecoms official said on Monday, after an outage that the government said had cost the economy millions of dollars a day.

However, a police officer said attacks by Islamist militants had dropped during the outage that lasted more than three weeks.

«The internet is now back and clients are using it,» said Adnan Ali, the media director for Hormuud Telecom, the country’s top operator.

Businesses had to close or improvise to remain open during the shutdown and the telecoms minister told state radio it cost the equivalent of about $10 million in daily economic output.

Information Minister Abdirahman Omar Osman apologized to citizens on Tuesday for the outage, which hit all landline and mobile users apart from those with access to private satellite connections, and called for them to have back-up plans.

«We urge internet companies to have a backup so that people do not suffer another outage in the future,» he told Reuters.

Source: News York Times

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