What Happened
On Sunday, May 24th, at approximately 10:30 AM, a major outage occurred on equipment owned and operated by AT&T, one of our upstream internet providers. This failure disrupted a large portion of internet traffic across the region. Although our internal network remained fully operational throughout the event, our connection to the wider internet was completely cut off.
Our network is intentionally designed with multiple redundant fiber paths from different vendors, routed in physically opposite directions to avoid exactly this type of scenario. Under normal circumstances, a single fiber cut or vendor issue would not impact customer connectivity.
However, in this case, AT&T controls a critical piece of upstream hardware that—despite our redundant design—was able to interrupt all of our external connections simultaneously. AT&T has reported that the outage was caused by failed hardware on their side, which they repaired later that evening.
Resolution
Root cause identified by AT&T
AT&T confirmed a hardware failure within their network as the source of the outage and completed repairs.
Full service restored
Connectivity for all LiteWire customers was fully restored at approximately 8:30 PM on May 24th.
Preventing This in the Future
While this outage originated outside of our network, the fact that a single upstream provider’s equipment was able to disrupt all of our redundant paths is unacceptable. We are actively investigating how this was possible and will be working with AT&T and our other fiber vendors to ensure that no single point of control can override our redundancy design.
Our goal is to eliminate the possibility of this type of upstream failure impacting customers again.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at (608) 882‑4728.
Thank you for your patience during this outage.