Roughly 15,000 people in southeast Albuquerque were without the internet after an outage Monday night continued through Tuesday afternoon.
Comcast said its network was damaged by a third party, which caused a service outage early Monday night that affected about 15,000 customers.
“Comcast is aware of an outage caused by damage to one of our fiber lines by a third-party utility, impacting some customer services in Southeast Albuquerque,” Comcast spokesperson Kyle Biederwolf said. “Our local technicians are on-site working to restore services as quickly as possible. We know any time without service is frustrating and apologize for the inconvenience to our customers.”
Comcast said the damaged site was deemed safe for repair at 12:45 a.m., at least six hours after the outage occurred. Internet service was initially expected to be restored by overnight, then by 3:40 p.m. Tuesday, according to Comcast. As of 4:00 p.m. Comcast had pushed the restore time to early evening.
The specific utility responsible for the damage remains unclear, but Albuquerque has faced ongoing issues with several companies installing fiber internet infrastructure.
Vexus Fiber was issued a stop-work order on March 20. That was lifted on Monday. The order was put in place after Vexus Fiber committed several violations of city ordinances and state regulations regarding barricading and excavation. The Department of Municipal Development, the Planning Department, and the Department of Technology and Innovation have been working weekly with Vexus Fiber to ensure compliance and remediation.
Ezee Fiber also had its stop-work order, in effect since May 7, removed on Monday.
Xfinity customers can check outage status via the Xfinity App or at Xfinity.com/outage, and can sign up for text notifications by adding their mobile number to their account on Xfinity.com or the Xfinity app.