As most customers know by now, Aristata Communications has been experiencing ongoing but intermittent outages throughout its service area both yesterday and today, November 8 and 9.
Ark Valley Voice reached CEO Carlin Walsh by phone moments before 5:00 p.m. and learned “that there is a core network issue related to our hardware.” According to Walsh, “We have multiple technicians both here and in Denver working this issue. Customers will see intermittent outages until it is resolved.”
AVV staff in Buena Vista were affected yesterday and again today. Retailers on F Street in Salida also reported issues and according to one unverified account, “some decided to close temporarily”, as they reportedly could not transact their business.
In a posting on the Aristata Communications website, the company noted:
“To our valued customers, We are currently experiencing a network-outage due to failed hardware. We are incredibly sorry for this inconvenience. Although we have a number of sites up and running, our network is not stable. Worst case scenario, we expect to have connectivity back up no later than mid-day Friday.
Best case scenario, we will have our network up and running on Thursday.
Thank you for your understanding and your patience.
We apologize and are working around the clock and as quickly and efficiently to fix this problem.”
Chaffee County is no stranger to internet outages and it is every service providers’ worst nightmare. Recent improvements by Aristata and others are helping to improve uptime but hardware failures are tough to deal with. This is an evolving story and Ark Valley Voice will provide updates as they are received.
Editor’s note: the Aristata outage affected Ark Valley Voice news stories yesterday, when we lost Internet connectivity The final drafts of two news stories did not save, resulting in spelling typos that weren’t overridden with corrections. We apologize for the errors.
We’re lucky to have a local option like Aristata. Much better than the days when some dummy accidentally cutting a fiber optic cable in Ute Pass would shut off the internet and phones for a large chunk of the valley.
How widespread was there outage? I heard some crazy rumors that it stretched to Texas and Denver. I didn’t think their service territory was even that large.