CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) said it has restored service in north Phoenix and northern Arizona after repairing a fiber line that it said was "deliberately cut" in the New River area.
Around noon on Wednesday, CenturyLink employees notified police that they began getting calls from customers saying their video and Internet services were not working.
Officer James Holmes, a Phoenix police spokesman, told azcentral.com that after the telco checked its system, the outage was traced to the area of New River and Circle Mountain roads.
Upon looking at the cable conduits, they realized that someone cut through the cable, causing services to be disrupted.
Due to the cable cut, incoming and outcoming voice communications between the areas north of Carefree Highway, up through the central corridor along Interstate 17 to Flagstaff and Page, were not working. In addition, some areas could not get Internet access.
While 911 calls were still working through the outage, Flagstaff police Sgt. Margaret Bentzen said that non-emergency calls were not coming through to their system.
Local police said they were investigating but did not immediately have any suspect or possible motive for cutting the cable.
CenturyLink may be the latest telco to see its service interrupted due to vandalism, but it is hardly alone. Acts of vandalism against telcos and cable operators have unfortunately become a common occurrence.
Besides cutting fiber lines, a number of telcos including AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Frontier and Hawaiian Telcom have continued to report vandals stealing copper cable.
Earlier this month, Verizon announced it was offering a reward for up to $50,000 to apprehend whoever is responsible for stealing cable in Beaver, Fayette, Lawrence and Washington counties in Pennsylvania. Likewise, Hawaiian Telcom has reported seven incidents of copper theft in the Kalaeloa area, near the now closed Barbers Point Naval Air Station (NAS), since 2011.
For more:
- azcentral has this article
- CBS News has this article
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