Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Amr Talaat, defended his ministry’s response to the Ramses Central telecoms hub fire during a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday, following criticism from politicians over the incident, which left four dead and caused widespread service disruptions.
Addressing the parliamentary Communications Committee after being summoned by Speaker Hanafy Gebaly, Mr Talaat explained that the fire began on the seventh floor of the building, in a server room, where smoke detectors triggered an alarm.
Employees tried to extinguish the fire, but it spread rapidly through cable conduits, necessitating intervention by civil defence teams, Mr Talaat told the committee. “The fire suppression system in the building was overwhelmed by the intensity of the flames,” he said.
Mr Talaat said Ramses Central is a critical hub but not the only one in the telecoms network, and that contingency plans were enacted to reroute services through other facilities.
“The internet and mobile services were gradually restored, and financial platforms like ATMs and payment gateways are now operational,” he said, adding that technical teams were still addressing minor problems in rural areas.
The minister said a thorough technical review would be conducted to identify the cause of the fire and introduce measures to prevent similar incidents in the future. Egypt’s parliament was highly critical of the government's handling of the fire, which broke out on Monday.
Earlier on Tuesday, in a televised address during parliament’s general session, Mr Gebaly said the decision to summon the minister was taken after a large number of official complaints from MPs.
“It is the minister’s responsibility to appear before parliament immediately after such a major incident, to explain what happened,” Mr Gebaly said.
He added that Mr Talaat “should have been the first person” to attend the session and that his failure to do so undermined transparency. During the session, MPs also demanded accountability and urgent action.
One MP, Diaa El Din Dawoud, described the response to the fire as a “catastrophic failure” and accused the government of neglecting Egypt’s telecoms infrastructure, despite significant investment in digital transformation projects. “The entire country came to a halt because of a fire in one telecommunications hub,” Mr Dawoud said.
In his address, videos of which were widely shared on social media, he added that the fire exposed the fragility of Egypt’s telecoms infrastructure. He questioned what happened to the funding allocated to digital transformation projects.
Amr Darwish, another MP, said a parliamentary committee should be set up to investigate the incident, while MP Ahmed Farghaly called for the senior officials to resign.
The Ramses fire, which started in a seventh-floor operations room on Monday evening, burnt for six hours before being contained. At least 39 people were injured, including firefighters, civil defence officials said.
The fire caused significant disruption to critical services, with internet and phone connectivity across Cairo and parts of Giza severely affected. Financial services were also disrupted.
Services began to improve on Tuesday as other telecoms hubs across the country absorbed some of the load. Full restoration of services was expected by Wednesday morning.
The scathing response from parliament came amid public criticism on social media. "What happened at Ramses Central exposes significant flaws in the protection and security systems of a sector that has long received substantial funding to maintain its services. It is both astonishing and regrettable that communications could fail and descend into chaos without any ready alternative plans in place," one X user said.
While parliament was debating the Ramses fire, a blaze broke out at a sponge factory in the industrial zone of New Damietta City, in the Nile Delta. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
