Construction work caused fibre break that knocked out internet, phone service

Phoneand internet service has returned for Whitehorse residents after an outage in the Yukonthat lasted most of Thursday afternoon and evening.

At 7:30 a.m. Friday morning, Northwestel said its technicians had been able to repair damaged infrastructure that caused the outage, and restored "all services."

"They worked all night and didn't stop until the job was done," the telecom wrote in a Facebook update.

In an interview, Northwestel spokesperson Catherine Newsomesaid the issues began around 5 p.m. YT Thursday for long-distance calling, internet and TV.

She said they suspected something had been damaged in northern B.C., and sent out crews to start investigating.

"You can imagine, with the nature of some of the issues we see in northern Canada, environmentally, things that go through our heads are flooding, fires, landslides so we had to be ready for everything," she said.

Crews found the damaged infrastructure at a site north of Fort Nelson, in an area called Steamboat, she added.

"They were able to see that it was actually caused by some construction that was happening in the area, unfortunately," she said.

That meant the repair would be more straightforward than if it was caused by a natural disaster. Newsome said some services started being restored Thursday night around 10 p.m., with crews working through the night to finalize the repairs.

"All services were restored very early this morning, at around 3 a.m.," she said.

While the focus for the company has been on restoring service, Newsome said their attention will now turn to how to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Building up redundancy

Newsome said cell phones were still working and there was a small bit of internet thanks to what the company calls a "microwave shot" from the Dempster.

"[That] can only provide so much traffic to the Yukon when things like this happen," she said. "It's reallylimited capacity, but it is able to keep some critical functionality going."

She said the eventual Dempster fibre line would change incidents like this in the future so the impacts of fibre cuts aren't felt as broadly.

"We're really keen for that to be completed," she said. "We actually expect it to come online this year ... it's such a key piece to the puzzle here in northern Canada."