UPDATE, 6:35 p.m.:

It is the fiber optic line.

John Britton, a spokesperson for AT&T, just comfirmed to the Lost Coast Outpost that the telecommunications outages throughout Humboldt County this afternoon were caused by damage to their fiber-optic trunk line just south of Willits. Britton said that his information, coming from AT&T crews on the ground, is that a small grass fire damaged a power pole supporting the fiber-optic cable, the county’s sole trunk line to the outside world, just outside that town today. The cable appears to have been damaged but not completely severed, Britton said.

The good news, he added, is that the company keeps stocks of fiber-optic trunk line in the area. Britton said that his understanding is that crews are working on the problem tonight. 

“We’ll be able to get in there tonight and repair this quickly,” he said. “I don’t have an ETA, but I hope we’ll be able to get this fixed by tomorrow.”

UPDATE, 5:15 p.m.: KSLG’s John Matthews just got through to a Suddenlink support person who is putting the problem down to quote-“The Fiber”-unquote, but we are of the opinion that she does not know what she is talking about.

UPDATE, 4:55 p.m.: Thanks much for your status reports, and keep ‘em coming. Right now, we’re going with “Guest’s” post of a couple of moments ago as the most convincing explanation we’ve heard:

I got through to SL tech support about an hour ago. As we were speaking, a status update came on his screen. Part of SL’s backbone is on ATT servers and those servers are down. It’s an ATT issue. Figures. Estimated repair time is 2-4 hours. Who knows if that’s still the case. At least it’s not the fiber line, thankfully.

ORIGINAL POST: Yes? Everything’s down here in Ferndale — Internet and phone both. Reports coming in of outages in Eureka and Arcata.

LoCO superfriend Kym Kemp simultaneously reported trouble with her Verizon phone down SoHum way. Our Verizon cell phones are working fine, but we can’t get any tech support from our ISP. Could it be that Suddenlink uses its own phone service?

Give us a status report, if you can. Where are you in Humboldt County, what ISP do you use and are you having any trouble?