Company's voice mail messaging system went out of commission.

BTC spokesperson Charmaine Burgess said the disruption only lasted half an hour and was caused when engineers were forced to close the system down to correct a time code problem.

But last night several BTC voice mail customers complained that their systems were still down and had been inoperative all day.

Telephone voice mails for Government offices were affected by the problem and the Bermuda Fire Services revealed that their system was down as well.

Yesterday evening BTC explained that the time code in their centigram voice messaging system was discovered to be four hours fast.

Mrs. Burgess said engineers found that the time stamps had been switched to meridian time, after complaints from customers.

"They had to bring the entire system down in order to do the switch back to Atlantic time,'' she said. "That was only for half an hour and by 1400 hours everything was back up and running as normal again.

"The cause is now under investigation,'' she added.