This story will be updated during the day as events warrant.
A telephone and internet service outage affecting much of Southeast Alaska is continued for a third day Saturday, with a spokesperson stating at about 6 p.m. efforts are underway to implement an emergency fix and further information will be provided Sunday.
Heather Marron, an Alaska Communications spokesperson, wrote in an email to the Empire “our engineers and technicians have provisioned restoral capacity to the State of Alaska to support State services.” However, a spot check of the Permanent Fund dividend application webpage and the Alaska State Legislature’s website showed both were still down as of 7 p.m.
Crews “made good progress today and are continuing work to restore service to the rest of Juneau and Southeast,” she wrote.
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.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
