This Is How The Lebanese Are Reacting To The Internet & Data Outage In Lebanon

Asharq AL-awsat | The Arab Weekly

For a good week or so, Internet and Cellular Data have been going out and cutting off in several cities in Lebanon as a consequence of the strike of the employees of the telecom sector.

Some are experiencing a timed cutoff and others are facing a complete outage. With everything else falling apart, the Lebanese have to also face this challenging situation.

In an era that practically runs on telecom and internet connections in many aspects, people wonder in frustration and anger how deeper the state can continue digging the hole of its collapse.

Many took to Twitter in between the internet cutoffs to express their opinions, mostly addressing Ogero. Here are the most relevant tweets:

Translates to: “Demanding the most basic rights is a right and a duty.
As for stopping internet services and landlines to demand your rights, this is a pure crime.
Enough manipulation of people’s livelihood!”

Translation:
“To go on a strike until you reach your demand,
this is your right.
However, to stop the hotline of the Red Cross as part of your strike is a crime that is not your right at all.”

Translation: “Raising the tariff and poor service.”

Translation:
“Stuck at home, gasoline is expensive.
We’re dying from the heat and there is no electricity.
We can’t work, there is no internet.
Communications with the outside world are cut off, and if we die, we can’t even call the Red Cross.
We are already stuck in the country as there are no passports available
.
What’s the solution? Just finish us already!”

Translation:
“People in the east and west of the earth, we might disappear from you because of the gradual interruption of the internet and the phone in the Lebanese regions, and here we are waiting for our turn.
If we suddenly disappear from you, don’t consider it a stance [against you], but that’s because we are gradually going back to the stone age.
We’ll meet you back again if there is no other disaster.”

Translation:
“Who gave the employees of Ogero the right to isolate Lebanon from the world and humiliate an entire population?
How are you better than the military, the policeman, the professor, or the rest of the public sector employees for you to ask to be paid in fresh dollars? And the irony is that
the telecom sector is a major cause of what we have reached as a result of waste and corruption.
What a masquerade…”

The expats had also their word to say. Here’s one of them:

Related: Ogero Employees Strike Threatens Internet Cut Off In Several Regions In Lebanon.