The director of the American Samoa Telecommunications Authority, Puleleiite Tufele Li’amatua, says a mechanical malfunction on a satellite link caused the island wide internet outage yesterday.
He explained that the malfunction occurred on one of the motors used by the satellite dish to auto align itself with the orbiting satellite in space for downlink and uplink of internet capacity over the O3b satellite internet service.
When O3b Service was lost, only the American Samoa Hawaii Cable was available but the capacity was limited to just 125 megabites per second.
The outage began at 10 yesterday morning and lasted till 9 last night when service was fully restored and .internet traffic was normalized.
Puleleiite apologized to customers for the outage.
He said, “I as the CEO of ASTCA convey our sincere apologies for the inconvenience the outage from yesterday may have caused and we will try our best to prevent such issues from occurring in the future.”
And he added, “Remember, we’re counting down on months before Hawaiki arrives on island and be able to provide 200Gigs of capacity on day one.”
