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Two days, three outages. On Wednesday night, Buckingham County residents experienced their third internet outage in less than 24 hours. Brightspeed officials worked to correct it and say they’re doing everything possible to prevent these in the future. 

Brightspeed is the internet and phone service company that acquired the customers of Lumen Technologies, the parent company of CenturyLink. According to a spokesperson from the company, the repeated issue involves cut cables caused by a third party. 

Work crews are operating across the county, laying down fiber to create high speed internet networks. The problem is that in multiple cases, these work crews come from third party contracted companies. Cables already in the ground are cut, as workers don’t notice the markings. When digging, the first cable was cut on Tuesday, May 16 and Brightspeed was able to restore the outage that night. 

The same company, when continuing their digging on Wednesday, May 17, hit two more cables, causing multiple outages for Brightspeed customers. The final one happened along Route 60. 

Brightspeed assesses the damage

“We have called a crew out to assess the damage to restore the line as quickly as possible,” said the spokesperson. “We know this is a very frustrating situation so we are doing what we can to make this right.”

According to the spokesperson from Brightspeed, the outage on Tuesday night only affected six customers and without an exact number, they assume the number is close for Wednesday’s situations as well. Officials said they were working to bring their customers back online as soon as they could. As of Wednesday night, several residents in Buckingham were still without internet.