Telephone Outage Hits Athens

Published January 14, 2015

Nearly 50,000 telephones at Olympic sites and parts of Athens went dead for more than 10 hours Thursday, officials said.

The outage follows a July 12 electricity blackout across southern Greece that raised concern over the stability of public utility networks ahead of the Aug. 13-29 Olympic Games (search).

The phones went down during attempts to upgrade the system, officials said.

"Some 48,000 fixed-line phones stopped working during work to improve a telephone switching center," Christos Malapanis, an official at the Greek Telecommunications Organization (search), or OTE, told state-run NET television.

Company officials told The Associated Press that sites affected included the Olympic Village, which opened last week, a media village, and four other games facilities. A back-up network kept about half the telephones working at the affected sites, the officials said.

OTE and Greece's Public Power Corporation are both Olympic sponsors.

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