Damage to an aerial fiber line took down service for Breezeline customers in three states for more than five hours Tuesday evening, prompting questions about how so large an area could be impacted by a single cut. But an operator representative told Fierce the cut that took out service was actually the second of two it suffered in the same day.
The operator on Twitter acknowledged an outage affecting subscribers in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware just after 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday. It attributed the incident to “damage to our fiber facilities” and said crews were working to make splicing repairs. Breezeline also tweeted a short video of the cut cable which showed a downed aerial line and a tangled mass of fiber along what appeared to be a rural stretch of road.
By 10:45 p.m. ET, Breezeline reported that service had been restored for most customers and technicians were working to reconnect the stragglers.
The incident prompted several users on Twitter to question what network redundancy measures Breezeline has in place. Some even threatened to switch to satellite service Starlink and called on Verizon to bring its Fios service to town in response to the incident.
A Breezeline representative told Fierce the operator actually suffered two separate fiber cuts on Tuesday. A construction accident in Fredericksburg, Virginia impacted its primary fiber facilities, but customers weren’t initially impacted because a secondary fiber path was available. However, a truck accident on Route 301 in Sudlersville, Maryland severed its backup fiber circuit at 3:55 p.m. It was this incident which resulted in the three-state outage.
“Repair of fiber cuts is by nature complex and time consuming, and a cut of this kind could have taken 12 hours or more to repair. Breezeline crews worked expeditiously to conduct the necessary repairs and had service restored by 8:55 p.m. for almost all customers. The remaining 1,098 customers were restored by 11:00 p.m.,” the representative said.
Breezeline, formerly known as Atlantic Broadband, is the eighth largest cable operator in the country. It currently serves a dozen states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. The operator recently won $3.68 million in grants from the state of Maryland to expand its service in three counties there.