Crews working to restore service for nearly 5,000 CenturyLink customers
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REXBURG– Thousands in the Rexburg and Ririe areas are without internet and phone service.
An outage affecting CenturyLink land lines and broadband connection have left around 4,800 customers without service since 7 p.m. Thursday.
“This was not a CenturyLink-caused problem,” regional market development manager Megan Griffin said.
The problem is expected to be fixed by 6 p.m. Friday.
“Our guys have worked unbelievably hard to ensure that we get everybody who’s affected by this outage back up and running as quickly as possible,” Griffin said.
Griffin said a fiber optic line was severed by a third-party company.
“From the second our system alerted us to the problem, we have had people on site who (have) worked all night long in this weather,” Griffin said.
CenturyLink crews had to dig a trench to discover where the problem was. She said the portion of the line that was cut was located on a hillside making it harder to access. Crews discovered the exact location at around 11 a.m. Friday.
“They are trying to dig in 18 inches of frozen ground,” Griffin said.
Griffin encouraged those who are digging to call the dig line first to ensure other cables won’t be affected.
“We appreciate everybody’s patience as we work so hard to get them back up and running and obviously apologize for the inconvenience and encourage people to always call the dig line,” Griffin said.