A cut fibre optic cable at one of the city's contracted construction sites is what led to last week's network outage, which affected a host of St. Albert facilities and operations.
The city announced in a news release on Aug. 5 that that morning, network connections to several city of St. Albert offices and locations went offline. It was updated on Aug. 9, stating that all systems and network outages had been resolved.
St. Albert's Director of Information Technology Joanne Graham said that she couldn't share specific details about the cut, but that the city is actively investigating how and why it happened.
The fibre cut currently has not been repaired, Graham said, although the city was able to utilize what it calls secondary loops, which allows them to redirect the network in the event of an outage caused by a disconnected cable.
"Now we're still in the process of building that out, because once it's built out we'll be able to reroute network traffic much more quickly," Graham said. "Once we knew where the cut was, we were able to look at basically our entire fibre network and identify where we had to make the changes to reroute all the traffic to the affected facilities."
The affected facilities immediately after the outage took place included Servus Place, Jack Kraft Public Works Facility, Liggett Place, Splash Park, Fire Halls Two and Three, as well as the city lines to Maloney Place.
Graham didn't get into details when asked about how exactly both fire halls were affected by the network outage, but said the safety of the people of St. Albert was never at risk due to what she called their business continuity processes.
"They were still able to dispatch, they were still able to go on calls. Details about those calls had to be tracked manually and entered into our record management systems after the fact. But the function of dispatch and the crews getting out the doors and knowing where they were going and responding to calls was not affected," she said.
911 service remained operational, Graham said, as did RCMP phones and RCMP networks at Maloney Place. Credit card payments at Servus Place were down, but were back up by Wednesday morning and online payments and MyCity online services were operational by Thursday morning, Graham said.
She said the City will continue building out secondary loops so they are able to reroute their network much more quickly should an outage like this occur again in the future.