The two internet outages that hit the Roaring Fork Valley in the past week are not related, a Comcast spokesperson said Wednesday.
The disruptions, which stretched from Aspen to Glenwood Springs on the evening of May 5 and again Tuesday afternoon, lasted for at least 3.5 hours in both case. Some cellphone services also were interrupted during the outages.
Leslie Oliver, director of media communications for Comcast’s Mountain West region, said Wednesday the outage last week was not connected to this week’s outage.
Tuesday’s interruption in service was caused by a dump truck that cut aerial lines in the Carbondale, she said. The May 5 incident was caused by a mistake during a planned Colorado Department of Transportation project.
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“The May 5 outage was related to some planned (Colorado Department of Transportation) fiber maintenance work, which caused an unplanned impact to our redundant network out of Utah,” Oliver said. “We had CDOT prioritize the work they were doing on our fiber and service was restored.”
The Tuesday outage hit during the middle of the day and lasted nearly four hours. Oliver said local crews were able to repair the damaged lines “as quickly as they could.” The incident occurred near the interchange of Highway 133 and Main Street.
An official from Verizon said Wednesday via email that the company relies on the fiber lines for its coverage.
“Verizon uses another fiber provider in the area to carry information between its cell sites and the core network,” said a statement emailed to The Aspen Times. “On May 5 and 12, the fiber provider experienced technical problems, which briefly impacted some of our cell sites in parts of western Colorado.”
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