Thousands of trunk and international phone calls were misdirected or failed to get through yesterday because of a computer software malfunction at one of Dublin's busiest exchanges.
The fault, at Eircom's Dame Court exchange, affected calls between about 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., when the problem was rectified. A spokeswoman said the company would be tracing all misdirected calls and would correct bills where necessary.
Eircom was last night unable to estimate how many telephone users were affected or how many complaints it had received but the spokeswoman said that, on an average day, the exchange would have dealt with "about a million" calls during the period in question.
Local calls were not affected by the problem, she added. Asked if it was fair to suggest that thousands of other calls had been affected, she accepted it was.
Earlier, the company admitted the fault had caused "congestion" at the exchange, a major centre for routing international and trunk calls.
Engineers from the software providers, Ericsson, worked on the problem for a number of hours before it was corrected.
The Irish Times switchboard received numerous misdirected phone calls yesterday, mostly from people outside Dublin trying to reach numbers beginning with the digits 6718.
