Alaska City Loses Internet, Cell Service for Days after Subsea Fiber Break

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2, 2024 – A key Alaska city and a popular port of call for cruise ships has not had landline internet and cell phone service for days, and it could be at least another week before the restoration of normal service.

The city of Sitka, located on the Alaska Panhandle, lost service Thursday morning after an undersea cable break apparently just 30 miles away. Alaska's first capital as a U.S. territory with about 9,000 people, Sitka is located on Baranof Island and is accessible only by air and sea. Sitka is expecting the arrival of 600,000 cruise tourists this year.

According to a published report, GCI, the state's leading broadband provider, has dispatched repair vessels from Seattle about 850 miles away to find the cable break and fix it. It could take five to six days for the ships to arrive and several more days to complete the fiber splicing work.

A spokesman for the Sitka Police Department on Monday told Broadband Breakfast that its headquarters had reliable Internet access via satellite.

"We have Starlink here," the spokesman said, referring to the low Earth orbit service provided by the SpaceX subsidiary owned by Elon Musk.

Tricia Bruckbauer, a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines, told Sitka radio station KCAW that the airline flew in IT personnel to Sitka on Friday to restore some internet access by installing Starlink.

Subsea fiber cable breaks can happen for different reasons. Past cases include fishing vessels that dragged anchors without checking seabed maps first. Underwater landslides have also inflicted damaged. Last summer, about 20,000 North Slope residents lost internet access for about 14 weeks after a massive ice scour in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea severed a fiber line buried deep in the sea floor.

The widespread outage in Sitka highlighted the importance of subsea fiber lines in maintaining access to the internet and keeping communities, businesses, and anchor institutions thriving in a globally connected world.

Sitkans attempted to cope by accessing the internet from Starlink connections available in City Hall and the Public Library. Sitkans gathered to check email, send text messages, and pay property taxes, which were due Sept. 1, according to one report.

Some Sitka businesses went cash-only because credit cards sales required Internet access. Health services have imposed restrictions, including the cancellation of elective surgeries. Landline communications have not been affected, and the police department said 911 calls were getting through.

In a recent paper, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned U.S. national security officials that China and Russia in a military conflict might sabotage subsea fiber lines in an effort to cripple the economy of the adversary.

According to CSIS, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft own or lease around half of all undersea bandwidth worldwide.

The CSIS report emphasized the need for a more cohesive legal framework to protect subsea cables, recommending that the U.S. and its allies prioritize both security and efficiency in repairs and installations.

"Undersea cables are critical to global communications infrastructure, supporting everything from financial transactions to national security communications, making them a prime target in the escalating great power competition between the U.S., China, and Russia, as well as for other state and non-state actors," CSIS said.