LAFAYETTE, La. — LFT Fiber, which provides high-speed internet, TV and phone services, announced an outage that began Tuesday afternoon was caused by damage to a main Lumen fiber line in Texas. Lumen is a major backbone provider that connects regional networks like LFT Fiber, and the cut affected many in the region.
Olde Tyme Grocery was among the local businesses hit by the service disruption. Manager Kyle Maurer said they noticed problems immediately when their phones stopped working.
"The phones stopped ringing and we knew there was an issue. We notice around 2:30, 3 o'clock yesterday that the phones were down. Usually we do a very large volume of call-in orders," Maurer said.
The phone outage reduced foot traffic to the store, but the business was able to continue serving customers through alternative channels.
"We definitely saw a lot less traffic in here yesterday. We do online ordering and we do Door Dash and we do Easy Cater so those places were other avenues for people to still get their orders in. We also had a lot of walk-in business that said they couldn't reach us on the phone, we are lucky to have a loyal following. So those people still came in," Maurer said.
By Wednesday morning, Olde Tyme Grocery was back to normal operations.
"This morning we are up and open and operation fully functional like normal," Maurer said.
LFT Fiber said in a statement that restoration efforts have been completed and many customers are seeing their connections return to normal. The company's team will continue monitoring the network closely to ensure everything stabilizes as expected.
Click here to read the full statement from LFT Fiber regarding the outage.
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