Icy weather was the cause of a widespread outage for Spectrum cable TV and internet customers in Maine and New Hampshire on Friday that lasted most of the afternoon and into the evening before being resolved.

The fiber optic network that carries internet service to northern New England was damaged in two locations shortly before 4 p.m., a spokeswoman for Spectrum said.

Complicating matters were downed electrical lines near one of the breaks, preventing cable utility workers from repairing the damage as quickly as they would have liked.

“Our crews cannot access the site until the power company clears the area,” said Lara Pritchard, senior director for communications in the Northeast for Charter Communication, Spectrum’s parent company. Pritchard declined to say where the network breaks occurred.

The ice storm hampered access to the weather-damaged cable, with roads closed and trees down in that location, she said.

It wasn’t clear if the outage was related to a problem that seemed to be affecting service elsewhere in the Northeast, as reported by the website Down Detector.

The company sent out a tweet shortly before 4 p.m. Friday saying it was aware of a problem affecting most of its customers in Maine and was working to restore service.

 


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