Many Gibraltar businesses suffered from a major power outage on 28th April following an incident in the vicinity of the dockyard. This had a knock-on effect on telecommunications including mobile and internet services. The impact on small/medium businesses was considerable with the retail sector particularly exposed on a day when there were two cruise ships in port.
However, many of the global businesses based in Gibraltar, in particular online gaming and financial services operators, benefited from having previously identified this type of risk with proper mitigation in their business resumption plans, as well as utilising premium services provided by specialist local suppliers.
Whether through their own facilities or services delivered – e.g. by external suppliers or landlords – big business in Gibraltar generally kept operating as normal. Offices in the Europort commercial complex were not affected by the power outage thanks to considerable investment in uninterruptable power supply and generators. Internet companies who rely on Gibraltar having resilient telecommunications were also mostly unaffected as, although Gibtelecom services went down (with damaged hardware delaying any chance of a quick resolution for some), Sapphire Networks’ customers were not disrupted.
Sapphire, who specialise in resilient services for this industry sector, were also able to quickly support customers requiring extra short-term capacity to cover for Gibtelecom’s problems with their recently-launched Event Bursting service. “Event Bursting was designed specifically to help betting companies with major sporting events as well as this type of disaster scenario” said Lawrence Isola, Sapphire’s Managing Director.