Back to the Pre-dial up days for Prince Rupert Internet users on Tuesday

CityWest  and Telus both suffered from a fibre cut 
on Tuesday that brought communication services to a standstill 
across the Northwest

It was a trip back to the early 1980's shortly after 11AM on Tuesday, that as a fibre issue somewhere to the west of Topley left a gaping hole in the Northwest Internet infrastructure, a long running service interruption that lasted into the early evening period.

For most of Tuesday, office work came to a slow crawl as  paper files replaced search engines, children would discover things outside of the house after school and household chores topped surfing for a day. 

That as the residents of Prince Rupert and the Northwest experienced some life before the fibre cables changed our lifestyles forever; the eight hour or so interruption making for a reminder as to just how we have come to rely on the wired world for our day to day activities.

CityWest advised its customers, or those that had ways of seeking out their Facebook page with an update shortly after the outage at 11:30 AM.  

Though most the day would be one of residents mostly refreshing browsers to see if anything had changed.

In addition to internet service, some television options offered by CityWest were impacted by the outage as well.

Prince Rupert's communication company was not alone when it came to sharing the bad news, the damaged Cable  also impacted on Telus service across Northwestern British Columbia as well.

Of some irony from the outage, many residents who have phone service through the Fibre optic service to their homes, could not actually call CityWest to seek out any information, nor it seemed could CityWest answer calls.

That was also a situation facing the City of Prince Rupert as todays outage continued through the afternoon.

 

Original estimates for a return to service had suggested the situation would not be resolved until Wednesday morning, however the modems started flashing across the city by 9PM.

Further details on the Tuesday outage can be followed through the CityWest social media page

More notes on communication across the Northwest can be explored through our archive page.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.