About 600 Gilroyans have been without the Internet for more than
24 hours thanks to a Verizon technician who accidentally
disconnected current customers to set up a connection for new
customers.
About 600 Gilroyans have been without the Internet for more than 24 hours thanks to a Verizon technician who accidentally disconnected current customers to set up a connection for new customers.
About 4 p.m. Tuesday, a Verizon technician went into a central office in Gilroy to set up a connection for new customers, according to Jon Davies, Verizon’s manager of media relations for the West Coast. However, in setting up the new connection, the technician disconnected an existing connection, thinking there were no customers on it.
“Typically we have procedures to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen,” Davies said.
Verizon did not get reports of the outage until 5:58 a.m. Wednesday morning, at which point the company diagnosed the problem and began fixing it, Davies said. He said service should be restored to all customers – old and new – by late Wednesday.
The outage caused some headaches for South Valley Internet, which handles many of the customers who were without the Internet, said Bobby Glover, the company’s director of information services.
“The number of calls we get is up greatly right now,” he said. However, the customers have been forgiving because “they know it’s not our fault,” he said.
Glover said he had never run into such a problem in his 10 years of experience.
“You hear horror stories all the time,” he said.
Although Glover can now claim to have experienced it, Davies said Verizon will be making efforts to ensure Glover does not have a second such experience.
“We’ll do a full investigation to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Davies said.
