Bell Aliant says it's going to launch an investigation into how 100,000 phone customers in St. John's and internet clients all over Newfoundland lost service late Friday.
Telephones were operating again Saturday morning after a power cable shorted at a switching station in St. John's, starting a small fire that led to a loss of service for five hours. But it's not clear why backup systems didn't kick in, Bell Aliant spokeswoman Brenda Reid said. The company has all kinds of redundant systems, so "this particular type of outage is unprecedented," she said. "We'll certainly investigate to see what occurred."
The fire, reported at the Bell Aliant building in the Allandale neighbourhood of the city, broke out about 10 p.m. local time. A technician at the scene extinguished the fire quickly before firefighters arrived, Reid said. There was no 911 service during the outage, but police said there were no major emergencies. Automated bank machines and credit cards were unusable because phone lines were out. Flights continued to land at St. John's airport throughout the evening, but controllers were unable to contact other airports.
Technicians worked for hours on the problem, and by 3 a.m. local time Saturday, Aliant said phone service had been restored. Internet service was back a few hours later.
News source: CBC.ca
Telephones were operating again Saturday morning after a power cable shorted at a switching station in St. John's, starting a small fire that led to a loss of service for five hours. But it's not clear why backup systems didn't kick in, Bell Aliant spokeswoman Brenda Reid said. The company has all kinds of redundant systems, so "this particular type of outage is unprecedented," she said. "We'll certainly investigate to see what occurred."
The fire, reported at the Bell Aliant building in the Allandale neighbourhood of the city, broke out about 10 p.m. local time. A technician at the scene extinguished the fire quickly before firefighters arrived, Reid said. There was no 911 service during the outage, but police said there were no major emergencies. Automated bank machines and credit cards were unusable because phone lines were out. Flights continued to land at St. John's airport throughout the evening, but controllers were unable to contact other airports.
Technicians worked for hours on the problem, and by 3 a.m. local time Saturday, Aliant said phone service had been restored. Internet service was back a few hours later.
News source: CBC.ca
Man this outage really sucked but the service going wonky all week though like dissconnecting(with DSL) when i was trying to d/l some WoW patches.
Come to think of it, this was BAD but not quite as BAD when some fools cut the main phone line and killed all the phones in most of the province back a few years ago. I'm not sure if they ever found the exact culprits of that one.
Last edited by Marduk on 24 Oct 2006 - 11:39
Yeah i've been getting disconnected all week randomly...
you guys rock
That would suck tho - to get cut off like that... I didn't think about the ATMs, credit cards, and AIRPORTS wouldn't work :| Good thing nothing serious happened there...
It was pretty freaky though, I had friends over, and we went out not knowing cell phones weren't working. Apparently, their parents went crazy trying to find them.
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