BRAINERD — About 7,000 residents and businesses between Pillager, Baxter and parts of Brainerd were affected by a CTC service outage Wednesday, Aug. 31.

According to Andy Isackson, CTC’s director of Member Operations, the issue was first noticed at 5:30 a.m. with a report of a CTC fiber line down between Pillager and Brainerd.

CTC dispatched engineers to replace the fiber and noticed no internet traffic going across the fiber.

“Our network engineers have been trying and working with the company that we utilize the access gear on there, to try to get it up and going,” Isackson said. “We've slowly been able to get some customers up and we're still working with them to try to get everybody up here a little bit quicker.”

Internet services are slowly being restored throughout the impacted service area. Again, we appreciate your patience as we work to fully restore services!

About 3,000 residents and businesses had their internet restored just after 1 p.m., Isackson said.

The biggest issue, Isackson said, was CTC was not seeing traffic come back up across that fiber. Currently, CTC does not know what is causing this bug, but they are working in order to fix it. As of Wednesday afternoon CTC officials didn’t know when the service would be fully returned but they were hoping to resolve the issue quickly.

“We're trying to figure out exactly what the bug was that brought this down or who has traffic not going across it, so it could come up anytime,” Isackson said. “It's really hard on this particular one to get an estimated time of repair. If it was a straight fiber cut, and we were sending crews out we'd have a pretty good idea of ‘hey, it might take an hour for crews to get out there and patch it’ but with this one being on the network side it makes it a little more difficult to forecast that.”

According to Isackson, CTC’s main goal is to permanently fix the larger issue in order to get everyone up quicker.

CTC is posting updates online at https://www.goctc.com/status/ and on Twitter.

SARA GUYMON, Brainerd Dispatch, staff writer, may be reached at 218-855-5851 or sara.guymon@brainerddispatch.com