Breezeline outage caused by 'two separate cuts' to fiber facilities

Two separate incidents caused cuts to Breezeline's fiber facilities yesterday, the second of which took customers offline in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia for several hours.

The first incident was a "construction accident that cut our primary facilities outside of Fredericksburg, VA at around 1 PM," said a company representative. "Customer services were not affected, as a redundant fiber path was available."

However, that incident was followed by a cut to Breezeline's backup circuit nearly three hours later, at 3:55 p.m., which was "caused by a truck accident on Route 301 in Sudlersville, MD," said the representative. "This produced an outage affecting our customers in DE, MD & VA."

News of the outages surfaced on Twitter and was reported by NetBlocks on Tuesday evening. Breezeline also acknowledged the outage and shared video of the downed fiber line from its field engineers.

"Repair of fiber cuts is by nature complex and time consuming, and a cut of this kind often takes 12 hours or more to repair," said the company representative in an email to Light Reading, adding that "almost all" customers had service restored by 8:55 p.m. "The remaining 1,098 customers were restored by 11:00 pm," the company confirmed.

Breezeline, previously known as Atlantic Broadband, serves broadband customers in parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina and Florida; and last year it acquired WideOpenWest's Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, systems.

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— Nicole Ferraro, editor, Light Reading, and host of "​​The Divide" podcast.