Thousands of people in eastern Alberta were cut off from their phone and internet access for much of the day on Thursday.
A communications line was cut in eastern Alberta and caused the failure of multiple Telus services, including landline, wireless voice, internet, TV and other services provided by the telecommunications provider, an Alberta Emergency Alert said.
Everyone with the company in east-central Alberta was expected to be impacted.
“If you use Telus, you will not be able to contact help if there is an emergency,” the alert issued at 11:15 a.m. said.
The Telus said affected communities included Castor, Drumheller, Halkirk, Hanna, Oyen, Stettler, Sunnynook, and Veteran.
The Alberta Emergency Alert also said Cessford, Consort, Delia, Acadia Valley, Cereal, Coronation and Youngstown were affected.
Telus services would not work to contact help if there was an emergency so people were advised to check all communication devices for a signal, including landlines and cellphones.
“Make plans with your family, neighbours and friends to help each other if an emergency does occur. Tune into local media and local websites for information,” the alert said.
Telus said the problem began just after 9 a.m., when a road construction crew cut a fibre cable near Halkirk. As a result, home phone, all mobile service, Optik TV and internet service all went down.
Telus said service technicians had been engaged and sent to the site to investigate.
“Our team is working to restore services as quickly as possible, and has notified local municipalities and emergency services out of an abundance of caution,” a Telus spokesperson said.
There was no firm time for when the problem would be fixed, however Telus said it hoped to restore service by late evening.
On Thursday night, the emergency alert said Telus had confirmed the restoration of wireless services in the impacted areas, however landlines were affected by the outage for an additional hour or so.
As of 7 p.m., all alerts on the Telus service status website were removed and service was restored.
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