On Sunday, May 26 SwiftCurrent Connect had a large scale outage that halted service for the majority of our customers for about two hours. We are not proud of any outage time, but this event provided us a significant learning experience and one that has already made our service more resilient to issues in the future.
We received notification around 8 p.m. that we had lost power at our Beldenville substation. Our broadband fiber huts have backup power, so at first this was not a big deal. Unfortunately, the extent of the outage created an issue with a couple of key pieces of equipment that were unable to stay powered for the whole time of the outage.
We started to receive word from our technical support staff that we were seeing an increasing amount of broadband outage calls. We responded quickly. First we brought our Ford F-150 Lightning to the hut and began restoring service. Not knowing how long the outage may take, we decided to bring our portable generator to the site and eventually we were able to switch over to generator power just in case it lasted longer than we anticipated.
During this time, our staff fielded calls, responded and posted to social media. Often times we have found that social media is the quickest medium to get information to everyone. We are working to make this easier to send out on other channels such as e-mail, phone and text. Around a dozen people between our lineman, electrician, operations staff, IT staff, and customer service staff responded. To say we are proud is an understatement. This outage occurred on Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend. Like most, our office was closed was the next day for Memorial Day. It would have been easy for our staff to ignore the issue and hope someone else would fix it. Instead they jumped in, got online, hopped in their vehicles and responded.
This outage gave us a chance to review a few of our procedures. The equipment that caused the issue has been dealt with and is now on the same backup system as everything else. We will be doing additional training on the generator and restoration in the future so that everyone has a good sense of what to do next time.
With that said, you might say that was the rest of the story. Truth be told, it pretty much sums up the events that happened one night. However, there is more thing that I am most proud of when it comes to our staff. Everyone took ownership for what happened, what needed to done to rectify the issue for the future, and admitting our issues publicly. We could have easily ignored our customers and just restored the service, some people would have never known including our competitors. Interestingly enough, we weren’t the only company that had service issues that weekend. Three other providers who serve our area had issues as well. Not a single other company posted on social media, sent a letter to their customers, or responded to questions about what happened. They simply said nothing, leaving their customers to wonder what happened.
Being a local provider owned by our community means a local response. We will tell you the good, the bad, the ugly. That might give us warts from time to time, but you’ll know why, you’ll know what we did to fix it and you’ll have an open ability to provide feedback when we don’ do a good job. That’s the difference when you are owned by your community and by the people you serve, not by investors or a select few. SwiftCurrent Connect will never be perfect, but we will be local and we will communicate with you, our customers.
— The SwiftCurrent Connect Team
