Cable damage causes Southeast Alaska internet and cellphone outage, temporarily affecting state websites
Mar. 1—JUNEAU — Damage to a subsea cable led to widespread cellphone and internet outages in Southeast Alaska, and caused state government websites to go offline for much of Friday into Saturday before services began to be restored.
Service first went out late Thursday evening. A spokeswoman for Alaska Communications, a telecommunications provider based in Anchorage, said Friday afternoon that a repair ship was being dispatched.
"We are also working to find alternate ways to restore connectivity in Juneau," said Heather Marron, a spokeswoman for Alaska Communications, at 12:30 p.m. Friday.
"This is our top priority and we deeply apologize for the inconvenience. We know how important staying connected is and we will not rest until this is fixed," she added.
Marron said by email at 2:30 p.m. Friday that Alaska Communications was working to provide "temporary" restoration of services. Permanent repairs would take longer "as it takes time for the repair ship to get to the location and perform the fix," she said.
By Saturday evening, Alaska Communications said in an update posted to social media that technicians and engineers had restored some capacity "to the State of Alaska to support State services."
"They made good progress today and are continuing work to restore service to the rest of Juneau and Southeast," the telecom provider said in Saturday's update, adding that they "will keep working throughout the night to get service restored."
Alaska Communications expected to share another update Sunday morning unless new information emerged before then.
MyAlaska — the central online portal for Alaskans to access government services — was offline Friday. State websites were also unavailable to apply for a Permanent Fund dividend, to renew a driver's license, and to book ferry trips.
The Alaska Legislature's website was also offline Friday, along with telephone services to legislators' officers. Lawmakers and legislative staffers said that email was working intermittently during the outage.
By Saturday evening, several of the state's websites had started coming back online.
Many state government websites are run out of Juneau, which is why they were offline across the state, Marron said.
State House and Senate floor sessions and committee hearings were held as normal Friday afternoon, and streamed on KTOO-TV, which uses a different service provider.
The Juneau Police Department posted on social media to say that the outage affected the department's business lines. But 911 calls were working as normal.
Alaska Communications' infrastructure is used by other carriers, including AT&T. A spokesperson for the telecommunications giant said they were in touch with Alaska Communications as they worked to restore service.
"We appreciate the patience of our customers while this work is completed," an AT&T spokesperson said by email.
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