Wednesday, several area residents, organizations and businesses suddenly found themselves without internet, email and phone service for the majority of the day.

 

Early Wednesday morning, customers of MidContinent Communications saw their phone service fall dead and internet, TV and email grind to a sudden halt, all due to two “accidents” in Sherburne County.

 

The first problem arose when a county snowplow truck (allegedly) wreaked havoc on a junction box just north of Bank Street on Sherburne Avenue in Becker.

 

The second issue occurred in the Clear Lake area when a MidContinent technician said a fiber line was cut due to some boring in the ground - probably by a contractor.

 

Becker Schools were affected by the outages that had the teachers scrambling to conduct classes without the aid of computers, iPads and the such for most of the school day.

 

“The outage didn’t affect our phone system but it did make us tracking down students who needed to be reached during the school day more bothersome, said Network Technician Sumre Robinson. “Usually we’d just go on our website and see where the student is supposed to be and then go track them down. Wednesday we had to run from room to room basically.”

 

City Hall also was without phone, internet and email services and city business came to a virtual standstill as employees tried to function without the services they so critically depend on.

 

“We have our phone systems over VOIP so when our internet goes down, our phones go down with it,” said Kelli Neu. “We had people telling us they were calling and trying to get through and some even came right to our offices wondering what was going on.”

 

The Sherburne County Citizen’s complete communications system (phone, internet, email) went kaput just hours into acquiring service from MidContinent the day before. Customers who called into the Citizen were welcomed with a rude busy signal until just after 3 p.m. when service was restored.

 

“I can assure you, this was a rare occurrence,” said the MidContinent technician who worked on the Sherburne Avenue outage. “Check with our customers and you’ll see we’ve been very reliable as far as service. This was just a freaky thing that happened.”