The city of St. Albert is currently experiencing a system wide network outage, affecting phone lines and other services, with repairs currently estimated to be completed over the weekend.
The outage began on the morning of Aug. 5, city spokesperson Cory Sinclair said in an interview.
"Upon investigation we learned that there's a disruption in the city's fibre optic network and so crews are now working to make those repairs to restore all the systems and the connections back to normal," Sinclair said.
The outage seems to be due to a cut cable, potentially from some development work being done which led to the lines being inadvertently cut, he said. The scale of the city's outage is far-reaching, affecting system, network, and phone lines for some city facilities including Servus Credit Union Place.
911 services are still operating, as well as the St. Albert RCMP and Municipal Enforcement Services non-emergency 24 hours complaint line (780-458-7700). The city is currently dispatching over radio, and Sinclair said emergency personnel are still able to operate as normal. However the Municipal Enforcement general inquiry line as well as the dog licence general inquiry line are both down, with residents unable to get through or leave messages.
"Anything that requires an internet connection, such as a credit card transaction, is not possible," Sinclair said of the situation at Servus Place. This extends to membership sign ups, although he wasn't sure about registrations to upcoming programs.
"Anything that would require an online registration would not be possible. But we're trying to maintain operations with the pen and pencil sort of approach by making records and taking notes. And then once the system's back online, then we'll update everything," he said.
One of the other major services impacted is the city's booking system.
"We've made appointments with folks for a safety inspection and yet we're not able to determine what those deployments were or where they may have been located," he said, and added that the missed appointments were more routine safety inspections and nothing major.
"Once all the systems are back then we're going to contact the impacted residents and reschedule those appointments. But in the meantime we know it's quite frustrating for them," he said.
Sinclair said the situation was still fluid, but the hope is to have the city's systems, phones and networks back online in three or four days, if all goes well.
"We are still determining how long it will take to redirect the fibre connections and to repair the fibre break," he said in a follow up email, adding that the repair work and time required for it would be significant.
The city will provide further updates once they know more.
