Alaska Communications Suffers Brief Outage after Damage to Subsea Fiber Cable

WASHINGTON, March 3, 2025 – Much of Southeast Alaska was without phone or internet service over the weekend after an Alaska Communications subsea fiber cable broke last Friday.

Juneau, the capital of Alaska and home to about 31,000 people, was especially impacted by the subsea damage.

“Our technical team has confirmed damage to the ACS subsea cable system connecting Juneau. We are dispatching a repair ship. We do not yet have an estimated time for restoral. We are also working to find alternate ways to restore connectivity in Juneau,” Alaska Communications said on Facebook.

In an update on Saturday, ACS said some phone and internet services were restored via an emergency, third-party provider.

By Sunday morning, the company had restored most of its services to customers in Juneau and the Southeast area.

“You should be seeing internet and voice services working again. We continue to work on restoring remaining impacted services. If your internet service is not yet working, please power off your modem, wait 2-3 minutes and power it back on,” a Facebook update read.

The outage is the third in a series of undersea fiber cable disruptions affecting multiple providers since late last summer.

In August, residents of the Alaskan port city of Sitka lost internet and phone services for 16 days when a similar incident severed a GCI Communications subsea fiber cable. 

Fast-moving sea ice snapped a fiber cable owned by Quintillion–a U.S. Arctic cable provider–on the ocean floor on January 18, 2025. Quintillion has yet to restore high-speed internet to affected customers, citing poor repair conditions and the lack of an easy temporary fix as obstacles.