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SALT LAKE CITY — All services have been restored after a CenturyLink outage affected Utah government, emergency services and residents Thursday and Friday, according to the company.
CenturyLink, a nationwide telecommunications company, said all customer services had been restored in a tweet just after 7 p.m. Friday.
The issues persisted well into Friday afternoon, according to a tweet from Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski.
Biskupski also tweeted Thursday afternoon that Utah government was experiencing issues with its phone and internet services.
#SLC government is currently experiencing issues with our phone and internet services related to a nationwide problem. We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing residents trying to reach departments. pic.twitter.com/Jq3oTRZnQi
— Mayor J. Biskupski (@slcmayor) December 27, 2018
Utah’s court system, Salt Lake Valley Emergency Communications Center, Unified police, Bountiful, Summit County and Box Elder County dispatch also experienced intermittent internet and phone service problems Thursday, though they were eventually able to rectify the issues, officials confirmed.
Pete Ashdown, CEO of local internet service provider XMission, said the problem may have been a sort of cascading failure — if bad information is sent out by one source, the rest of the system isn’t smart enough to recognize that as bad information and it gets copied out throughout the entire network.
That may be why the issue was so widespread, he said.
Ashdown says he doesn’t know enough about CenturyLink’s internal architecture to know if it was a malicious attack, but he maintains that it is a possibility.
The Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation of the telecommunications giant Friday after what it called a “troubling” nationwide outage that prevented some customers from being able to dial 911, according to a report from NBC.
"I have also spoken with CenturyLink to underscore the urgency of restoring service immediately," FCC chairman Ajit Pai said. "We will continue to monitor this situation closely to ensure that consumers’ access to 911 is restored as quickly as possible.”
It is not yet clear whether the outage prevented anyone from receiving emergency services, NBC reported, but a man who tried to report a house fire in Boston was forced to resort to one of the city’s old-fashioned, street-side alert boxes after he was unable to call from his cellphone.
“While our network is experiencing service disruptions, where CenturyLink is the 911 service provider, 911 calls are completing,” CenturyLink tweeted Friday afternoon.
“As you are aware, CenturyLink has been dealing with a network event. We take all service interruptions seriously and have had teams working around the clock to restore affected services. We have made substantial progress in restoring and stabilizing services across the network over the last several hours. We remain focused on resolving all remaining issues,” the company said in an emailed statement.
