Internet and cellular service went down in Sitka Thursday morning (8-29-24) shortly after 11 a.m.  

The Backdoor Café was in the middle of the daily lunch rush when the internet went out suddenly. Owner Ashia Lane said they quickly checked in with other downtown businesses and found out the outage wasn’t just affecting them.

“I think folks just kind of acted quickly and switched to either cash only or offline payments. We’ve done both today. We’re on cash-only at this point and hoping it comes back soon,” Lane said.

Around 4000 cruise passengers were in town, and Lane said the café was busy.   

“We have had a line most of the day in the cafe. Folks have been really patient and understanding. Now that we’re doing just cash only, we’ve lost a few sales, but we’re hoping the banks keep a lot of cash in town,” Lane said.

Sitkans who called GCI’s customer service line on Thursday to report the widespread internet or cell service outage got this message:

“GCI is aware of an outage affecting internet and NewCON TV services, within in O’Malley area, in Anchorage, and in Sitka. Technical crews are engaged, and calls to tech support is not needed at this time. Thank you.”

Around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, the lights were on at the AT&T store in downtown Sitka, but the door was locked and a sign on the door read, “Network down. No ETA.”

But not everyone’s network is down. Melissa Wileman is the public and government affairs director at city hall. She says the city is using Starlink as a backup internet provider, and it’s working.

“There has been some lulls and the service is a little bit slow, a little spotty, but overall its been okay, so we’re still able to get our jobs done,” Wileman said.

Wileman said the city was able to get some information about the outage from GCI after their IT Director reached out.

“We’ve heard back from them after our IT Director reached out,” she said. “They understand that there’s a currently an issue with service. They’re working as hard as they can to get things back up and running.”

The last time Sitka experienced a major internet outage was in 2016. At the time, KCAW reported that service was impacted for 12 days due to a damaged fiber optic cable at the bottom of the sea floor. So far the reason for this outage is unclear. As of press time Thursday GCI had not returned KCAW’s calls or requests for comment.