Services disrupted

After a series of outages affecting the Internet,

After a series of outages affecting the Internet, voice, long-distance and data services, Yukon residents experienced further disruption of their Internet services on Friday afternoon.

At approximately 2:30 p.m., Northwestel Inc. and its Yukon customers noticed slow speeds or were unable to connect to websites.

“It wasn’t a complete outage, but it was enough to really slow the service down,” said Anne Kennedy, the communications director for Northwestel.

Debit and credit card machines that rely on the Internet were also down.

“When the Internet slows down like that, often the connection is dropped before the connection is completed,” said Kennedy.

The problem persisted until 7:30 p.m. Friday, when all services were restored.

A router located in Northwestel’s main equipment building in downtown Whitehorse appeared to be the source of the issue, but the cause is unknown.

Beginning at about noon on Saturday, service from Latitude Wireless, which provides wireles services to 17 communities outside of Whitehorse, was also degraded.

Cell-to-cell calls did not appear to be affected, but customers had trouble making cell-to-landline and landline-to-cell calls.

‘There was some traffic getting through, some calls, but it wasn’t functioning 100 per cent,” said Kennedy.

Services were restored by 1:30 p.m.

Saturday’s outage was likely a result of Friday’s router problem, said Kennedy.

“In fixing one area, we might have inadvertently caused a problem in another area,” she said.

This month, Northwestel has experienced three unrelated major outages caused by severed fibre-optic cables in the space of six days.

Kennedy said some summers Northwestel has no outages, and what it has seen this summer is unprecedented.

Many people have been generally accepting of the cable-related outages, but “their patience was getting thin by Friday and that’s completely understandable,” said Kennedy.

“It has a significant impact on their operations,” she said about businesses that rely on the Internet for their operations.

“We did everything we could. We had probably about a dozen people working on the problem.”

The causes of both the Friday and Saturday disruptions are under investigation.