Spectrum customers in Brooklyn were without Internet for much of the day Friday after vandals tampered with the network, according to the company.
The company said in a statement to News 4 that its fiber-optic network in Brooklyn was vandalized early Friday morning, causing thousands of customers there to lose service.
"Our repair crews have been working tirelessly in the past several hours to restore service as quickly as possible. We appreciate our customers' patience as we do," said Spectrum. "We are also working with the NYPD on an investigation of this latest round of criminal destruction of our network."
Service was fully restored by 2:30 p.m., according to Spectrum.
Spectrum said crews had been restoring service gradually since mid-morning, but unhappy customers on Twitter said they were getting no communication from company, and demanded estimated times of restoration. Some complained that customer service was unreachable over the phone as well.
"ETA on fixing the issue? We work from home and rely on Spectrum internet," one woman said.
It's the third Spectrum outage in the city attributed to vandals in recent months. In June, a fiber optic cable serving four major hubs was cut, causing an outage that spread across central Queens. And then in July, another widespread outage affected customers.
A Spectrum employee was arrested in the June 26 outage, but charges were later dropped. The employee belonged to the International Brotherhood Electrical Workers Local Union 3, whose members have been on strike since the end of March because they couldn't come to a contract agreement with Charter Communications, the owner of Spectrum. The union has denied any involvement in either of the outages.
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(Disclaimer: NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast, a competitor of Charter Spectrum.)
