Dear MontanaSky Customers,
One of MontanaSky’s core values is being open and transparent with our customers about what is happening within our network and our business. When something goes wrong, we believe you deserve to know what happened, why it happened, and what we are doing about it.
On Saturday, we experienced our first full-system outage since 2017.
At approximately 9:30 a.m., a fiber cut occurred near the Kalispell fairgrounds. As a result, MontanaSky lost both our primary and backup connections to the internet.
To make matters worse, many of our critical systems are self-hosted. When our internet connectivity went down, we also lost much of our ability to efficiently communicate with our customers, including our phone system, email, and even our website. We posted multiple updates to Facebook and local Facebook groups, but without internet connectivity, our ability to communicate information was limited.
The fiber that was cut is not owned or operated by MontanaSky Networks. While MontanaSky has redundant internet connections that leave the Flathead Valley on separate routes to the east and west, we learned Saturday that those connections share a section of local fiber before those routes separate. Saturday’s fiber cut occurred within that shared section, resulting in the loss of all our upstream connectivity.
Fiber splicing crews arrived on-site at approximately 11:00 a.m., and service was restored at approximately 7:30 p.m.
An outage of this magnitude is unacceptable to us.
We can't control where or when a third-party fiber line may be cut or damaged, but we can control how resilient our network is when it happens. Saturday exposed an area where that resilience needs to improve.
I want to personally offer my sincere apologies for the disruption this caused our customers. We understand that losing internet service can mean anything from not being able to watch your favorite show to being unable to operate your business on a busy summer weekend. We take both seriously.
As a direct result of Saturday’s outage, we will be working toward the following:
| • | True physical route diversity. We will implement an additional connection to the internet using physically separate fiber infrastructure that travels in a different direction from our central office and does not share this same local point of failure. |
| • | Independent outage communications. We will develop a way to keep critical portions of our website—particularly outage and network-status information—available even when MontanaSky's primary network is offline. |
| • | Off-site backup telephone capabilities. We will establish a backup phone solution hosted outside of our network so we can continue providing information to our customers during a widespread outage. |
No internet provider can promise that a fiber will never be cut or that equipment will never fail. What we can promise is that we will continue investing in redundancy, improving how we communicate during an outage, and learning from failures when they occur.
For nearly nine years, we avoided a full-system outage. We are proud of that reliability, but Saturday made it clear that there is still more work to do.
Thank you for your patience, your understanding, and most importantly, for trusting MontanaSky Networks to keep you connected.
Ryan J. Bowman
CEO
MontanaSky Networks, Inc.