Phones and Internet Are Back in Mekelle

Telephone and internet service has been restored in Mekelle, residents of the Tigray capital told Tikvah Ethiopia on Monday night.

"It had gone dark for us"

The residents the outlet reached described the outage in plain terms. It had gone dark for them, they said, and they were glad to be back in touch with friends and relatives.

That is the whole of what can be confirmed. Fact.et is working from a Telegram post whose original Amharic text is truncated, and the further remarks it carries about conditions in the city cannot be checked against a complete original. We are not repeating them.

What a telecoms cut costs

For a business in Mekelle, a communications blackout is not an inconvenience; it is a shutdown. Mobile money stops. Bank branches fall back to paper. Importers lose contact with clearing agents in Djibouti. Suppliers cannot confirm orders, and customers cannot pay. Every day of outage compounds into receivables that cannot be collected and inventory that cannot be moved.

Restoration matters for the same reason. It is the precondition for everything else in the regional economy resuming — not a symbolic gesture.

Open

No official statement has set out when the outage began, what caused it, or who ordered the restoration. Ethio telecom has not published an explanation that Fact.et has seen. Nor is it clear whether service has been restored across the region or only in the capital. Those are the questions that determine whether this is a repair or a reprieve.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 5 October 2026