An outage affected between 70,000-90,000 Mediacom customers through Missouri on Wednesday included customers in Jefferson City.
Around 1:30 p.m. construction crews in northwestern Missouri cut an underground Medicacom-owned fiber-optic cable, causing the outage. Earlier a truck cut an aerial fiber-optic line around Cuba, Missouri, that Mediacom leases from an electric cooperative.
During the six-hour-outage, Mediacom customers across the state lost video, internet and phone services. Mediacom spokeswoman Phyllis Peters said customers in Jefferson City, Columbia, Springfield and other parts of northwestern and southwestern Missouri were affected.
Peters said a construction crew unrelated to Mediacom cut the underground cable with large construction equipment near Cameron at 1:41 p.m. Wednesday. Mediacom invests in redundant systems like the line near Cuba because the company knows that customers depend on Mediacom to run their businesses, Peters said.
"It's normally something that our customers would not notice," she added.
A truck-lift of some kind cut Mediacom's redundant cable, a fiber-optic line suspended in the air, near Cuba around 11 a.m.
Mediacom sent crews from northwestern Missouri and Jefferson City to repair the line near Cameron. Peters said repairing fiber-optic cables can be arduous.
"There are several thousand fibers that are around the width of a human hair," Peters said.
Service was restored between 7 -8 p.m.