THE festive mood turned to anger in Port Douglas late Saturday afternoon and into mid-afternoon on Sunday when the town was hit by an Internet outage.

Already struggling with painfully slow connections, Port Douglas businesses had to endure this additional pain – and to compound matters, it occurred a week before Christmas.

“The most frustrating and annoying aspect was the significant loss of sales,” said Emily Perry, owner of Rose&Boy, a clothing store on Macrossan Street.

“If customers did not have cash, we were unable to complete a sale. Everyone is impacted when this occurs and in today’s world, consumers use their banking cards for transactions,” she said.

A Telstra spokesperson said damaged fibre was the reason for the outage. They did not say how it was damaged.

“Damaged fibre, which caused disruption to services in the Port Douglas region, was repaired on Sunday.

“We apologise to our customer for the inconvenience. Our team worked throughout Saturday night and Sunday in difficult conditions due to recent heavy rain to restore services as quickly as possible,” the Telstra spokesperson said in a statement to Newsport.

The recently-appointed president of the Douglas Chamber of Commerce, Wade Greasley, did not respond to whether they (the Chamber) had any information regarding the outage and whether businesses had complained to the Chamber.

The Chamber has previously made a strong push to improve the Internet service in the town and has been in regular contact with Telstra.

Customers hoping to do shopping at IGA on Sunday, but short of sufficient cash, had to shelve their plans until the issue was resolved in the afternoon.        

How were you affected by the Telstra outage, let us know by commenting below.