Telecommunications Outages Affecting North Slope of Alaska

Published: 16 June 2023

A severed undersea fiber optic cable is causing varying levels of internet and phone outages this week across the North Slope of Alaska. The North Slope Borough has issued an emergency declaration related to the outages. Current estimates are that it could take six to eight weeks to fix the cable about 34 miles north of Oliktok Point, depending on ice breakup.

The telecommunications outages are also affecting the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility’s North Slope of Alaska (NSA) atmospheric observatory at Utqiaġvik. However, the NSA is still collecting data and has enough onsite storage to hold more than 30 days of incoming data. While ARM does not expect to lose any data, connectivity to the site is minimal, increasing the difficulty in monitoring and troubleshooting instrumentation.

Meanwhile, ARM is working on an alternate solution to restore NSA data transmission to the ARM Data Center, which is expected to be in place in about three weeks. Updates will be provided on ARM.gov when available.

If you are trying to get in touch with ARM personnel at the NSA, ARM appreciates your patience as they may not be able to immediately respond. Please contact NSA Manager Andy Glen if you have questions.