Sacramento Broadband Outage Could Leave Customers With Slow Speeds For Days

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — An Internet outage could lead to customers across Northern California facing slower service after a cable was cut on Tuesday.

The FBI says someone intentionally cut a cluster of fiber optic cables in the Livermore area on Tuesday morning, leading to widespread outages. They say someone went to a lot of trouble to get into an underground vault to cut the line that's as thick as a paint can.

On the first day of a Sacramento River Cats homestand, fans couldn't call Raley Field and buy tickets as phones were down for hours. Instead, the team sent out a Tweet asking fans to email them.

Ryan Eldridge with Nerds on Call says repairing the severed line is a major job that could last days. Traffic that would have flowed through that major line instead would be rerouted, leading to widespread slowdowns.

"That's going to slow down the Internet for the rest of us, so, streaming Netflix or Hulu tonight is gonna be rough until they get those cable lines connected," he said.

It may not be an isolated case. An FBI spokesman says the agency was already investigating 10 separate case of fiber optic lines being cut in the past year, including in Berkeley, Fremont, Alamo, Walnut Creek and San Jose.

The FBI says most incidents happened in the middle of the night. This latest cable is owned by two companies, Level 3 Communications and Zayo.