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GCI customers across Alaska lost service Monday morning — including thousands left without internet — as Municipal Light & Power crews worked to fix a power outage affecting the company's Midtown Anchorage headquarters. GCI restored service by Monday afternoon.
ML&P said in a Twitter post at about 1:15 p.m. that power "should now be restored" to the headquarters.
Final Update: Power should now be restored the Denali Towers building, after the cables were re-energized, due to the transformer replacement. Was a more encompassing job than some smaller outages, and we appreciate everyone's patience while crews worked hard to correct issue.
— Municipal Light & Power (@MLandP) July 9, 2018
GCI service was starting to be restored before 11 a.m., according to a Facebook post from a company official. Shortly after 4 p.m., all services had been fixed, a GCI spokesman said in an email.
By about 3:15 p.m., the company had restored wireless, local and long distance service, the spokesman said, advising customers who were still having problems with those services to restart their devices.
ML&P reported the power outage at Denali Towers, where GCI is headquartered, beginning around 4:35 a.m. Monday.
An "issue with a transformer" caused the outage, ML&P spokeswoman Julie Harris said. ML&P is investigating the reason the transformer failed, Harris said.
In an emailed statement, GCI spokeswoman Heather Handyside said that the company has redundant power sources to keep network equipment running for several hours in the event of a commercial power outage.
"In this circumstance, upon the loss of commercial power, one of GCI's dual backup power systems, which had been successfully tested on July 3, failed to operate," Handyside said in the statement sent early Monday afternoon.
"This combination of events caused today's outage and has complicated our efforts to restore services. We are still investigating the specific circumstances that led to the failure of the power system," she said.
All the services GCI offers were affected, Handyside said later in a phone interview, but it doesn't appear that every service was affected statewide.
More than 10,000 customers appeared to be affected by the internet outage, Handyside said, and most of that was in and around the Anchorage area. She didn't have numbers for how many customers were affected by outages of other GCI services.
TV service disruptions seemed to be concentrated in Southeast Alaska, she said. There was a statewide impact for wireless data and phone services.
A GCI alert about the outage on Facebook Monday morning was immediately followed by reports of land lines down and spotty cell and internet service in communities from Southeast Alaska to Dillingham, Kotzebue, King Cove, Fairbanks and Utqiagvik.