Jersey Telecoms fined £90k for island-wide blackout

Jersey Telecoms has been fined £90,000 by the island's competition watchdog for an island-wide blackout in 2020 - which meant meant islanders could not make 999 emergency calls.

The fine was subsidised after JT helped with the Jersey Competition Regulatory Authority's investigation in July 2020 and took steps to rectify the issues it identified.

JT has now put in place plans to improve its network capability and says it will give regular updates to the Authority on their progress over the next five years.

Tim Ringsdore, Chief Executive Officer of the Authority said, "This has been a long and complex investigation following an outage of the JT network that affected all consumers and businesses, including the failure of the essential 999 emergency call service. 

"Throughout JT has worked with us to resolve the issues and to put in place a system of checks and balances that will improve its infrastructure, process and procedures and help it to meet best practice going forward."

John Diamond, Interim CEO of JT said they have accepted the Authority's decision.

"We take any matters like this exceptionally seriously and have worked closely and productively with the JCRA through the process.

"I would like to apologise again to our customers for the disruption, and to thank our teams who have carefully and collaboratively worked through the sequence of events which led to the problem in July 2020, to ensure it will not be repeated.''