Juneau residents who use certain cell phone and internet carriers experienced an outage Thursday night that continued Friday.
The outage began around 9:15 p.m. Thursday with ACS and AT&T customers reporting limited or no service throughout the area. Residents in Haines, Skagway and Gustavus also reported interruptions.
In an email Friday afternoon, ACS media contact Heather Marron confirmed that there was damage to a subsea cable system that connects Juneau, and a repair ship is on its way to restore it. Last fall, Sitka was similarly without internet for more than two weeks due to a broken subsea fiber optic cable.
Marron wrote that the company does not have a timeline for when services would be restored, but is looking at alternative ways to restore connection.
“This is our top priority and we deeply apologize for the inconvenience. We know how important staying connected is and we will not rest until this is fixed,” Marron wrote. ” We will continue to share updates as we have more information.”
Juneau’s Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said the city’s phone lines are down, but the impacts of the outage to city functions are “significant but not debilitating.” He suggests residents email city officials rather than call in the interim.
Juneau School District is still holding classes as normal. Superintendent Frank Hauser said Friday morning that all district schools have a copper phone line that can be used to make phone calls, but the internet has been impacted.
“Teachers are still teaching, students are still learning,” he said. “It’s just kind of going back to, the books and the manipulatives in the class. We’re just continuing to focus on educating the students, working with them and doing what we do best.”
The Juneau Police Department posted on Facebook that its administrative phone systems were affected by the outage, though 911 calls appear to be functioning normally.
Capital City Fire/Rescue posted that some cell phones may not be able to call 911, but connecting to wifi might help.
State employees at the State Office Building downtown and in other parts of the state reported that the outage was affecting them. The alaska.gov website was also down Friday, restricting access to a number of state resources.
Business appeared to be operating as usual despite limited phone and internet access at the Alaska State Capitol.
Today’s Senate and House floor sessions are expected to meet as regularly scheduled. #akleg
— Gavel Alaska (@gavelalaska.bsky.social) February 28, 2025 at 9:53 AM
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
