BAKU -- RFE/RL's correspondents report from Azerbaijan that a massive Internet outage affected daily life in the oil-rich former Soviet republic in the South Caucasus on November 16.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies said the outage was caused by a fire at a landline of the major Internet provider "Delta Telecom."
According to the ministry, the fire has been extinguished and alternative, weaker Internet provider systems have been switched on while work to restore the line's operations is under way.
However, the Internet was still reported to be unavailable in some parts of the country.
The outage affected online banking and payments operations across the country. Some banks had to suspend operations as it became impossible to conduct financial transactions.