Published by Eric Stone | November 15, 2021

The customer service office of Ketchikan Public Utilities appeared in Plaza Mall in 2019. (Dylan Simpson/KRBD)

Update: KPU Telecommunications said late Monday night that the Internet has "basically restored to the island", but warned that as maintenance work in Canada continues, "remaining problems may persist."

On Monday night, the online videos of many Internet customers in Ketchikan were endlessly buffered. An accident involving rogue dump trucks and fiber optic links in Canada and a storm in British Columbia prevented Ketchikan’s main connection to the Internet.

According to reports, on Sunday night, a Canadian dump truck crashed into a fiber optic cable, damaging the 90-mile submarine link that feeds digital information into the southeast, and the problem began. As technicians worked all night until Monday afternoon to repair damaged lines, this slowed down most of Ketchikan’s Internet access.

Ed Cushing, telecommunications manager at Ketchikan Public Utilities, said that the alarm began to sound around 9pm on Sunday, and technicians began troubleshooting with their Canadian counterparts.

"After an hour, one and a half hours of elimination, the people on the Prince Rupert side discovered that a dump truck had torn off a fiber optic cable-an overhead fiber optic cable. We and the world Contact," Cushing said in a telephone interview on Monday.

According to reports, the collision occurred on Digby Island, just two miles from Prince Rupert. According to reports, the staff repaired the severed cable on Monday afternoon. Cushing said that this is good news.

"The bad news is that at approximately 11:30 last night, a part of the optical cable in the Okanagan Valley area of ​​British Columbia was destroyed by a landslide, causing part of the network of our Canadian supplier to be paralyzed," Cushing said.

Cushing said that due to flooding and landslides, the backup cable to southern British Columbia was also unavailable.

He said: "To make matters worse, there have been many network outages in the Greater Vancouver area, where all these various terrestrial fibers are converging, which actually brought most of the Internet services in northern British Columbia to a halt."

Cushing said that as of Monday night, there is no reliable estimate of when the service will be fully restored.

"This is because there is uncertainty when vehicles and technicians travel in these various areas affected by landslides-avoid floods and all other disasters," he said. "The guess we heard earlier today was (from) 24 hours to 48 hours to'we just don't know.'"

As the KPU's main connection with the outside world was cut off, and as the telecommunications company pushed traffic to the backup system, the traffic slowed to crawling. Cushing said this means that streaming video services like Hulu and HBO Max may not be available to most customers tonight. But not all streaming services are affected-Cushing said Netflix should still work, thanks to a pair of servers in KPU's central office, which host most of the provider's library.

As of Monday night, Cushing said that KPU is working to expand the traffic it can send over the submarine cable that runs directly from Alaska to Seattle. This will end the slowdown.

At the same time, "may be a good night to read e-books," Cushing said. "Or an ordinary book."

The outage did not affect cellular data networks or GCI customers.

Disclosure: KPU Telecom is a financial backer of KRBD.