Carmen Butler, market development manager for CenturyLink in Tallahassee, said service was restored to most customers at 1 p.m. As many as 1 million CenturyLink broadband customers were affected by the outage. Butler said a problem with core routers, devices that transfer data, were the cause of the outage. She said a thorough review is under way.
Update: 12:15 p.m.
Leon County School District’s web site, its individual school sites and online access throughout the district are down as a result of the CenturyLink outage.
Chris Petley, spokesman for the district, said email is still working. Petley said two or three virtual classes were canceled this morning because course instructors were unable to get online. Some standardized testing for reading has been delayed, he said.
Update: 12:01 p.m.
A local internet provider says the current CenturyLink service outage has spread across 22 states and spans across the state of Florida.
Ed Perrine, the chief of operations of Network Tallahassee, a local internet service provider, said all of his operations are down. Perrine said the outage is affecting all of Network Tallahassee’s 4,000 customers and the 600 to 700 businesses they serve. The outage is affecting all of CenturyLink’s Florida customers, said Perrine, which could number in the tens of thousands, he said Network Tallahassee received a call from a customer regarding the outage at 5:30 a.m. Perrine said he spoke with CenturyLink at 6 a.m. where they advised him the company was doing scheduled maintenance. At 7:35 a.m. they told him something had gone wrong during the maintenance and it was affecting customers in 13 states.
By 10:30 a.m., the company advised the outage had spread to 22 states.
Perrine said the company has not told him what is causing the outage, but said that just after 11 a.m., the company advised Perrine that they were in the process of restoring service. The timing of the update is questionable according to Perrine, who said maintenance is normally scheduled on early Sunday morning so if something goes wrong businesses won’t be affected.
“Their timing is questionable,” said Perrine, who said the outage has taken a toll on the business.
“It’s pretty significant,” said Perrine. “Our customers are frustrated.”
Original Update:
CenturyLink, an internet, phone and security provider in Florida, is experiencing a nearly statewide outage of internet service.
Carmen Butler, CenturyLink spokesperson for North Florida said “We do have a disruption in service,” but said she did not have any more information at the time. Leon County Schools uses CenturyLink and LCS spokesperson Chris Petley said the website was down, but those within the school system are still able to send emails.
He said he doesn’t anticipate any major problems from the lack of service “because of the end of the year.”
Butler said CenturyLink was working diligently to get service restored.