A car accident caused an outage for at least 20,000 Optimum customers in New Jersey on Wednesday, July 13.
The Altice USA-owned company offers Internet, TV, and phone services, which were all impacted by the outage.
“Earlier today, a car accident on Route 53 knocked down a pole, causing a fire, which led to a loss of services for some Optimum customers in the Parsippany, NJ area,” Altice USA said in a statement.
“Our teams were immediately dispatched to the scene and are currently on-site making repairs to restore services to affected customers as quickly as possible. We appreciate our customers’ patience at this time and will provide an update upon restoration.”
The car crash occurred during an attempted traffic stop, and the people inside sustained serious injuries. Police are investigating whether the vehicle involved in the crash was stolen.
Single points of failures regularly cause telecoms outages. Earlier this year, 30,000 were left without Internet in Oakland after a man shot overhead cables. Last month, a beaver brought down a tree that they cut Telus cables, knocking out the Internet in the rural Canadian region.
