Errant phone-line A Verizon Hawaii technician who accidentally sliced a one-inch fiber-optic cable yesterday cut off the phone service of hundreds of thousands of people across the state.
snip takes isles
off the hook
The Verizon mistake interrupts
service for 200,000 land linesBy Rod Antone
rantone@starbulletin.comVerizon and Verizon Wireless officials said the accident affected about 200,000 land lines on Oahu and Maui along with an unknown number of cell phones on all islands.
"It's difficult to put a number on it because it depends on where the wireless customer is at the moment," said Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Sherri Coronas. "But we do know it was pockets of service around Oahu, Kauai, Maui and the Big Island."
The accident took place at Verizon's central office in Kalihi at 9 a.m.
"The cable itself was small, maybe an inch," said Verizon Spokeswoman Ann Nishida. "But just one wire in that cable has the capacity to carry a minimum of 2,000 phone and data calls."
By 4:30 p.m., service to all affected customers had been restored, according to Verizon.
On Oahu, Kailua households with phone prefixes 261, 262 and 263 could only call and receive phone calls from other homes with the same prefixes, meaning they could not call outside of Kailua. In Kalihi, homes with prefixes 841 to 849, 851 and 852 had the same problem.
On Maui, Verizon officials said none of their 80,000 customers there could make long-distance or neighbor island calls, though Maui residents could call other Maui residents.
Other problems involved 911 emergency calls. A Honolulu police spokeswoman said that dozens of people calling 911 from Kailua and Kalihi said they had to dial several times before getting through, with one woman reporting that she needed to dial 911 five times.
The spokeswoman also said that at least one person who was having trouble getting through to 911 was calling for an ambulance. She said she did not know how serious the caller's situation was or whether not being able to get through caused the situation to get worse.
On Maui, police said that people in Hana also had trouble calling 911. Verizon officials said they had a Maui radio station broadcast to Hana residents that they could call the Hana police substation directly if they needed assistance.
The sliced line also affected other cellular phone companies, which rely on Verizon to transfer their customers' calls.
"Everyone was thinking it was our outage but it wasn't," said AT&T spokeswoman Lissa Guild. "The call initiates through our system, then it connects with Verizon, so when their systems go down our calls can't go through. We were only down because they were down."
Bank automated teller machines were also affected. Bank of Hawaii officials said until 2:30 p.m. yesterday, all of their 480 ATMs were working for Bankoh customers, but not for customers using bank cards from other financial institutions.
"When you insert your card it validates bank information through the phone system," said Bankoh spokesman Stafford Kiguchi. "But since the phone system was down we couldn't verify outside information and those transactions weren't able to go through."
First Hawaiian Bank officials said about 50 percent of their ATMs were of no use to anyone, including their own customers.
"Everybody was out of luck," said First Hawaiian Bank Spokesman Gerry Keir. "We have about 170 to 180 ATMs and about 80 were down."
Some pay-at-the-pump credit card machines were also down at gas stations in affected areas meaning customers had to pay cash for fuel. Local Internet service providers also said dial-up and digital subscriber line customers lost online service.
"A lot of our customers were calling up unhappy but there's nothing we can do about that," said Pixinet Support Tech Jason Economou. "It probably affected about 250 DSL customers.
"One of our customers who runs a health care business was kind of frantic."
Nishida said Verizon did not know what the technician was doing when he cut the cable.
"We will be conducting a full investigation to find out what happened," said Nishida. "But right now we're just glad to get everything working again."