It’s been a bad day for communications services across the U.S. This morning, it was 911 services across four states. Then it was an “intentional” AT&T cable cut at Sacramento airport.
Passengers were lined up and flights delayed for hours at Sacramento International Airport in California after an early-morning Thursday AT&T cable cut knocked out internet service for several airlines.
Southwest Airlines airport staff found they could not connect to the Internet and reported the problem to the company IT department, airport spokesperson Lindsay Myers told Fierce Network.
“Everything you associate with the internet was impacted,” Myers said. “The primary delays were that passengers were not being checked in and having boarding passes printed. Southwest had to manually write boarding passes and luggage tags.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office believes the cut to have been deliberate, and is investigating it as a crime, Myers said.
“There were no injuries,” Myers said. “We didn’t even have any flights canceled. We had a lot of delays.”
The cable, which was attached to a pole about 2.5 miles from the airport, had been slashed in one place about four or five feet from the ground in a manner that was "very deliberate" and "very targeted," Amar Gandhi, a spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, told the New York Times.
The Sheriff’s Office confirmed the cut on X.
"We’ve restored internet and wireless service to affected customers in the Sacramento International Airport area following a fiber cut which appears to be an act of vandalism or attempted theft. We appreciate the patience of our customers as we worked to make repairs as quickly as possible," an AT&T spokesperson told Fierce.
Fierce also reached out to the Sheriff’s Office comments on the cut, but had not received replies as of press time.
The cable cut comes shortly after four states, including Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota and Texas, experienced 911 and other services outages, which different government agencies blamed on a variety of causes.
In Texas, Juan Hernandez, the department's communications supervisor, said Thursday morning that the issue appeared to be with T-Mobile's service.
In Nebraska, the Chase County Sheriff’s Office said “911 is down across the State of Nebraska” for all cellular carriers except T-Mobile, and landlines were able to still get through to 911.
In other states, landlines were not working, and officials urged locals to contact 911 through text message.
The cause behind the 911 and other service outages is still under investigation.
This story was updated at 8:24 pm ET to include a quote from AT&T.
Julia King contributed also contributed to this story.