The Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) is conducting an internal investigation over what officials believe was sabotage of its network.

The investigation comes after the company experienced a total systems failure on Monday.

Prime Minister Perry Christie said this week that he, too, was launching a probe into the utilities meltdown.

He also told reporters that when the incident happened he was in a meeting with Cable and Wireless Communications’ (CWC) CEO Tony Rice.

The nation’s chief has made no secret of the fact that the government intends to attempt to retrieve the majority stake of BTC. CWC owns 51 per cent.

A source in BTC said it is believed that this is the reason why the service failure occurred.

“It’s just too coincidental that on the day the prime minister was to meet with the head of CWC there was a massive disruption,” the source said.

“Even worse is that when the breakdown happened, the generator and the backup batteries did not work.”

BTC Chief Executive Officer Geoff Houston said that he had not experienced anything like that in his 25-year career in telecommunications.

But he said at the time that it is one that officials must learn from.

“This is another one of those experiences where it proves that we have a lot to learn. We are extremely apologetic to all of our customers and we are going to learn from this exercise and we are going to learn very quickly from whatever the investigation throws up and we are going to do whatever we can to ensure that this never happens again,” Mr. Houston said.