SUFFOLK, Va. — A massive Spectrum internet and cable outage caused by Hurricane Helene has been impacting customers in Hampton Roads and northeast North Carolina, a representative from Spectrum's parent company told News 3.
Homes and businesses in Hampton Roads, Western Tidewater and northeastern North Carolina began reporting the outages on Friday, according to outage detection website downdetector.com.
Watch: At least 45 dead from Helene
As of Saturday morning, Suffolk and Hampton were among the highest reporting areas.
A number of customers took to social media on Friday to talk about the outage.
Watch: Flooding still major concern after Helene weakens
A post to the Town of Smithfield Facebook page indicated the outage is connected to storm damage to a major fiber optic cable in South Carolina.
Saturday morning, Suffolk Police said their non-emergency phone lines were also impacted. 911 is not impacted.
At 1:50 p.m. Saturday Suffolk Police confirmed those services were restored.
News 3 caught up via Zoom with those in Smithfield, after service in its downtown area had been restored Saturday.
Judy Winslow, director of tourism for Smithfield & Isle of Wight, said the outage fell on a busy time — the Smithfield Vintage Market where they had 91 vintage dealers lining main street and roughly 10,000 visitors.
"Certainly [the outage] yesterday was a massive impact here in downtown Smithfield," explained Winslow. "The vast majority of our small shops could only take cash. Some of them had to close up for the day. Smithfield Foods as a matter of fact sent all their employees home yesterday. It was crazy."
Though, she said, some sales were certainly lost, they had taken Helene into consideration when making plans. She said they got Starlink ahead of the event.
"I tell you what we were thanking our lucky stars we did this morning because not a single vendor would have been able to ring up any credit card sales for this huge event today," said Winslow.
Service was restored, she said, around 1 p.m. for many in Smithfield. Folks in other areas chimed in on Facebook that they were still waiting.
Full statement from Spectrum's parent company, Charter Communications, on the outages is below.
Network lines at our regional data center in the Spartanburg, SC area, were damaged as a result of Hurricane Helene. The network at this location is integral to providing our services to this area. Our technical teams are onsite working to restore services as quickly as possible for those impacted customers. We are communicating with impacted customers about the service interruption and that our restoration process is underway. We apologize for the service interruption.
On Background
With regards to restoration times, that may vary, in large part because restoration happens so quickly and beyond our control as power is restored, and there are lots of variables where customers may have power but not service and vice versa when power is lost at the node but not to the home.
If both power and cable lines are down, we work closely with the power company. In many instances, we follow them into a neighborhood and as soon as power is restored, we begin work to restore service as quickly as possible.
