Broadband Outage Leaves Sacramento, Rocklin Customers With No Or Slow Internet

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — Broadband services in the Sacramento area were cut on Tuesday, leaving hundreds of Wave customers without service.

The company says three major fiber cables were severed.

At Nerds on Call, it was a tech center with tech problems. Their phone service was down as a result of the outage.

"It probably cost us $10,000 or $15,000 just being down for that short time this morning," said co-founder Ryan Eldridge.

They weren't the only ones. Phone and Internet service was disrupted across the region. Wave initially described the outage as a coordinated attack, but the FBI refuted that in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

"Despite the impact to customers in a variety of service areas in Northern California, the vandalism which resulted in the reported outages was confined to a single geographic location in the San Francisco Bay Area," the statement said.

The fiber lines are as thick as a paint can and act as a backbone for Internet service. At that size, Eldridge says someone would have had to do it on purpose. He says Internet traffic should slow down as all of the traffic normally handled by Wave is rerouted elsewhere. That slowdown could last for days as repairs are made.

"It's not a trivial connection," he said. "I mean fiber is glass, and so they're gonna have to re-lay those fibers. It's gonna be a pretty big job."

The lines are owned by Level 3 Communications and Zayo.