This story will be updated as events warrant.
Some telephone and internet services were restored Saturday night, two days after much of Southeast Alaska was disconnected due to a damaged subsea cable system, via temporary measures as a ship designated for permanent repairs is scheduled to arrive in Sitka on Monday.
“We have restored a majority of services in Juneau and Southeast,” Heather Marron, an Alaska Communications spokesperson, wrote in an email to the Empire at about 8 a.m. Sunday. “You should be seeing internet and voice services working again. We continue to work on restoring remaining impacted services. If your internet service is not yet working, please power off your modem, wait 2-3 minutes and power it back on. Thank you for your patience as we worked through this event. We know how important being connected is and are deeply sorry for the extended outage. We thank our engineers and technicians who worked long hours, around the clock, to restore service.”
Some residential customers in Juneau messaged the Empire late Saturday night to state their phone service was restored, although others stated they are still disconnected. A spot check shortly after midnight Sunday found the state’s Permanent Fund dividend application site working, but the Alaska State Legislature’s website was still down. The Legislature’s site was back online Sunday morning.
The Juneau Police Department posted a message on its Facebook page at 9:15 a.m. Sunday stating its non-emergency phone lines are again working.
The initial outage occurring Thursday night disrupted a variety of business and government operations, including city and state websites. Some businesses were unable to take credit card payments or accept online orders. The outage largely affected AT&T customers in Juneau, since that is one of the providers serviced by ACS, although the local AT&T retail store set up a cell booster at its Mendenhall Valley retail store and a portable cell tower downtown to allow customers limited service.
The 477-foot-long ship Cable Innovator, a 1995 Finnish vessel that services West Coast undersea cable operators, is scheduled to arrive in Sitka at about 4 p.m. Monday after departing Victoria, British Columbia, on Saturday, according to the tracking website vesselfinder.com. Marron confirmed to the Empire the ship is one “deployed to support cable repair.”
“We have arranged for additional capacity and are actively working to provision it, which we expect to happen before the cable ship completes fiber repairs,” she added. A similar incident involving a break in a cable Aug. 29, 2024, disrupted GCI’s internet and phone service in Sitka, with repair work beginning Sept. 8 and finishing Sept. 16. Temporary service was provided during that outage via the satellite-based system Starlink, with The Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska loaning 24 Starlink terminals to Sitka.
GCI, in a message on its website Monday, stated service to Sitka customers will be at a reduced level between March 7-17 due to “emergency maintenance on a section of our underwater fiber serving the community.” However, the notice stated, “this is separate from the ACS network outage impacting Southeast Alaska” and that emergency work is taking place at a different location.
“Home internet service will be available in a very limited capacity and will only support very low bandwidth activities like email,” the GCI notice states. “Basic mobile voice and text are expected to remain intact. Landline services will be available but delays in audio may be experienced. Mobile data and Yukon TV services will remain down until the cable is repaired.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
