The most remarkable aspect of Friday's telecommunications blackout in Dublin's central business district was that it left the Eircom share price unaffected.
A day after the telecom group reported its debut half-year results, the shares actually closed up four cents at €4.16 (£3.28), a modest increase on the €3.90 (£3.07) flotation price of last July but a long way off the €5.00 (£3.94) the shares reached in the weeks after the flotation.
The joke in the Dublin market on Friday evening was that the only reason the shares did not go through the floor was that Dublin stockbrokers could not contact their clients to tell them about the disaster.
Joking aside, sources believe Eircom has a lot of damage to repair - and not just in its public relations. There is a view that telecom companies of its size - the company is valued at €9.1 billion (£7.12 billion) - simply should not suffer the sort of software problem that can shut down city-wide telecommunications.
More fundamentally, the blackout will focus attention on Eircom's preparedness for Y2K. While the company has stated that the problem is not connected to Y2K, analysts have pointed out that any further software problems in the run-up to the millennium could put pressure on Eircom's network capacity.
But despite everything, few in the Dublin market expect a sell-off of Eircom shares by institutional investors this morning. "The institutional investors who dictate the share price are unlikely to be sellers and will probably snap up small lines of stock that come on the market," said one Dublin broker.
Eircom's problems on Friday came in the wake of what was seen by some analysts as a downbeat presentation of the company's half-year results the previous day. The results themselves may have been reasonable - pre-tax profits of €160 million were in the middle of the range of forecasts from analysts - but some feel there is little indication of where future growth will come from, especially as competition in Eircom's domestic market will intensify from the likes of Esat Telecom and Ocean - the British Telecom/ESB joint venture.
But, despite trading at a premium rating to many other European telecom companies, Eircom shares are unlikely to fall significantly. The rapid consolidation of the European telecom industry - the record €124 billion bid by Vodafone for German group Mannesmann being the latest example - means that at some stage Eircom itself may become the focus of a takeover bid. Friday's blackout may have been embarrassing for Eircom but, if a takeover bid arrives in the next year or two, it will be ancient history. "It's not really a negative factor - embarrassing yes, but negative no," commented one Dublin analyst.
If there is to be a bid, Dutch telecom group KPN - which already has 21 per cent and can go to 29.9 per cent - is still seen as the most likely suitor. But there is a growing feeling that the neatest fit for Eircom is British Telecom - despite BT's involvement in the rival Ocean group.
What BT or any other buyer's attitude would be to a recurrence of the blackout can only be guessed at. But one thing is certain: Eircom cannot afford a repeat of Friday's fiasco if it wants to foster an image of a gogo, can-do international telecom group.