Optimum customers experience service outage on Thanksgiving Eve
Optimum cable, phone and internet connections were restored Wednesday night after tens of thousands customers experienced service outage on Thanksgiving Eve.
A spokeswoman for Altice USA, Optimum’s parent company, in an emailed statement did not offer a reason for the outages but said service was restored within two hours.
“Our crews worked quickly to restore service to those impacted, and in total the outage lasted less than two hours, with TV services returning even sooner,” said Altice spokesman Janet Meahan. “We know how important it is for our customers to have access to their connectivity services, especially during a holiday, and we apologize for the inconvenience and thank all those impacted for their patience as we worked to get their services back up and running.”
It is not clear how many total customers were affected, but an outage map showed more than 77,000 affected users around 7:30 p.m. in mostly Brookhaven Town where Optimum competitor Verizon FiOS is not available.
Sylvia Vogel, 86, of Ridge, was one of the affected customers and said she heard the same from friends from Mount Sinai to Wading River. A resident of the Leisure Glen retirement community, she noted that cable, phone and internet disruptions are especially troublesome for seniors who might not have cellphones to communicate.
“There was no way to reach Optimum at all to tell them there was this outage,” she said. “No one we could reach to find out just how widespread it was and what was going on.”
Angry customers posted on the company’s Facebook page Thursday morning that they were still not able to view football games or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
As of about 3:45 p.m. Thursday, Optimum’s online map showed service restored in most of Suffolk County but 252 outages remained in the Greenport area.
On Facebook the company said it was investigating the cause of the outage.
Vera Chinese covers Suffolk County government and politics. She joined Newsday in 2017 after working as an editor for the East End lifestyle publication northforker and a general assignment reporter for the New York Daily News.
