The Gig City was without its gig for about an hour Wednesday, impacting local businesses and individuals who rely on the service for daily operation.
EPB’s fiber optic internet service went offline for many citywide. A link that connects Chattanooga’s network to the internet outside the area lost connectivity around midday Wednesday, according to a statement from company spokesman John Pless. Service was restored by 1:30 p.m.
“We appreciate your patience and regret any inconvenience this issue caused,” Pless said.
EPB uses vendors to deliver connectivity through a variety of paths. At about noon, one of the vendors had an equipment failure that caused an outage in a communications circuit that serves EPB. The fiber optics traffic is designed to be re-routed if such an incident occurs, but some of the traffic was disrupted due to a configuration error on EPB’s part, Pless wrote in an email.
The impact of the outage was widespread, but EPB does not know exactly many customers we impacted since service was only partially disrupted.
The city-owned company was the first internet provider to offer gigabit service and later communitywide 10 gigabit internet speeds. The city’s marketing team quickly jumped on the opportunity to brand Chattanooga as “Gig City.”
For local restaurants, the brief outage proved troublesome during the lunch hour rush.
Jimmy John’s locations were unable to accept orders for more than an hour during peak time. Other restaurants began working cash-only. Businesses like Smoothie King had to turn away customers who only carried credit or debit cards. For sit-down restaurants, the problem proved more complicated. Customers who had already received food but didn’t carry cash couldn’t pay.
Uncle Larry’s son, Terrell Torrence, was at the end of an interview about the business with a local television station when the outage occurred. Employees had to deal with a similar experience over the weekend when storms caused a power outage at the popular family-owned fish restaurant. They began to improvise and connected their phones to the system to take orders and receive payments. However, the company still had to give away some free meals to customers who couldn’t pay.
“We basically had to give away two or three or four plates. I couldn’t keep track,” Torrence said. “We couldn’t accept any cards, we could only accept cash. That’s basically how it went.”
Several area banks and credit unions contacted by the Times Free Press said they either weren’t aware of an outage or were not impacted. CHI Memorial and Parkridge Medical Center do not use EPB, and an Erlanger spokesperson wasn’t aware of any problems.
Contact staff writer Mark Pace at mpace@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6659. Follow him on Twitter @themarkpace and on Facebook at ChattanoogaOutdoorsTFP.