United Fiber service interruptions impact customers across the area

Charles Christian anchors the evening news for News-Press NOW and also serves as an ordained minister at United Methodist Churches in Union Star and Helena, Missouri. Charles, St. Joseph News-Press, Mo.
·2 min read

Apr. 17—United Fiber customers continued to experience service issues Wednesday after an outage and emergency repairs began the day before.

An update posted to United Fiber's website on Tuesday at 2:51 p.m. said the company would be conducting "emergency maintenance" on its equipment due to "issues caused by this morning's power outage." The message said the maintenance was initially expected to take 10-15 minutes and would cause a "brief interruption" in services.

However, service issues continued into Wednesday. United Fiber CEO Jim Bagley said in a video statement on Facebook that the outage was caused by a power surge Tuesday morning that corrupted a critical piece of equipment.

In an email from United Fiber sent to customers Wednesday, the company said, in part, "We sincerely apologize for the ongoing outage and the inconvenience it has caused our customers. Our techs continue troubleshooting our network and our customer care team is contacting customers."

The email went on to direct customers to the company's online "contact us" link to open a ticket, citing a large influx of calls in the call queue.

While phone services, TV services and the United Fiber website are all listed as "operational," the network infrastructure still shows to have a "major outage."

As of Wednesday around 8 p.m., Nikki Dalton, United Fiber's chief marketing officer, said the company continued to work on the outage, which has affected around 10% of its customers.

United Fiber said its crews plan to work through the night to correct the issue to hopefully have the issue resolved by Thursday morning, but there was no exact time set for service to fully return.

In Bagley's video statement, he said at some point in the next two weeks, the company will spend one night doing a major overhaul to avoid this type of issue in the future.

Charles Christian anchors the evening news for News-Press NOW and also serves as an ordained minister at United Methodist Churches in Union Star and Helena, Missouri. Charles can be reached at charles.christian@newspressnow.com. Follow him on twitter: @NPNowChristian.