Men walk past a Vodafone-Qatar Telecommunication office in Doha on October 22, 2009.

:: One of Qatar’s two telecommunications companies is struggling to bring its network online following a widespread outage.

Vodafone Qatar said on Tuesday on Twitter that network engineers have arrived in the tiny Gulf country to fix the outage that began on Monday. It says that “all hands are on deck” to fix the problem.

Vodafone competes against Ooredoo, formerly known as Qtel. Both companies are partly owned by government-linked entities.

The outage happened as Qatar remains locked in a dispute with four other Arab countries that have cut diplomatic ties and severed air, land and sea links. They have threatened to intensify their isolation of Qatar if it does not give in to their demands.