Blown fuse blamed for Yukon cellphone, long distance outage
Outage began at noon and lasted about an hour and a half
Northwestel says a blown fuse at its Whitehorse office caused a cellphone and long distance telephone service disruption across the southern Yukon for about an hour and a half on Wednesday.
The outage began at noon PT and service was restored at around 1:20 p.m.
Internet and local calling was not affected.
Northwestel spokesperson Eric Clement says it was a 600 amp fuse that blew.
"Where we saw the delay is that once the issue had been identified, because of the safety concerns around an electrical piece of that size — it's fairly big, 600 amps could kill a person pretty quickly — we had to identify appropriate engineers and they needed to be on the scene to turn that back online."
Clement says when a fuse of that size is repaired, it takes some time to reboot before services come back online.
In September 2012, a problem at the Whitehorse office following a city-wide power outage cut landline, cellphone and Internet service to all of Yukon and Inuvik, N.W.T. for about half a day.