A telephone and internet service outage affecting much of Southeast Alaska is continuing for a third day Saturday, with a spokesperson stating at about 10 a.m. efforts are being made to implement an emergency fix — but indicating it might not be in place until at least the end of the day.
“Our engineering and technical teams have been working throughout the night to restore connectivity to Juneau and Southeast,” Heather Marron, an Alaska Communications spokesperson, wrote in an email to the Empire. “We have secured emergency capacity from a third-party provider and are actively working to provision it. The teams have made good progress and we are seeking to have connectivity restored as quickly as possible. This continues to be our top priority. We will share another update at 6 p.m. Alaska time March 1 unless we have new information before then.”
In a followup email, responding to a question about if the scheduled update means a restoration of service is unlikely until at least then, she stated “we will share updates before 6 p.m. if there’s a significant update. The backhaul capacity we’ve secured is enough to restore all customers impacted.”
The outage that began Thursday night is due to damage to a subsea cable system, according to ACS, whose carriers include AT&T. The outage is affecting many state government websites, phone lines for Juneau’s municipal government, and some businesses that are unable to accept credit card payments and online orders.
AT&T has a cell booster at its Mendenhall Valley retail store and a portable cell tower downtown that is allowing customers limited service. A sign at its retail store Friday gave an estimated time of noon on Saturday for restoration of service, but the company’s website on Saturday morning stated an estimate for repairs is “not known at this time.”