By Farai D Hove| ICT and Cyber Security Minister Supa Mandiwanzira has denied rumours that his Government shut down the internet during the day Tuesday.

He said instead, the government was deeply concerned that internet went down for most of yesterday. Mandiwanzira told the state media: “We are upset that internet connectivity is not available or has not been available for most of the day. Government is concerned about the situation.

“We expect that the operators must have redundancy so that if one aspect or connection is down, they can activate a different connection. It’s a requirement of their licensing that they must always have redundancy. How that redundancy has not kicked in for the nation to notice that there is no internet, we can not understand why.”

He promised that government will so facilitate more investors in the industry. He said the regulator would carry out an investigation and Government would respond accordingly.

“At this point, as Government, we want to facilitate business; we are pushing to make business successful and it is the direction of the new President, His Excellency Cde Emmerson Mnangagwa, that this country produces,” he said.

“We must be productive, we must focus on work and on growth. We cannot achieve that as fast as we want if we do not have a key element of production, which is the internet, and therefore we are going to re-look at our service providers to make sure that they have all their systems in place to provide redundancy.”

Mandiwanzira said the incident made Government realise that there was room for investment in the sector to make sure the situation did not recur.