Arlington County tree trimmers accidentally spliced through a Comcast fiber-optic cable Wednesday, cutting off phone, Internet and video service for thousands of customers in the southern half of the county.
The outage, which occurred at 8:30 a.m., affected 2,500 phone customers in Crystal City, Arlington County officials said.
Neither county nor Comcast officials could estimate how many Internet and video customers were affected.
Ten county government buildings lost their connection to data servers, Arlington County Cable Administrator Rob Billingsley said.
The county does not use Comcast’s phone service for government buildings, he said.
The damaged fiber-optic cable was quickly repaired and service was restored by 2:30 p.m., Comcast spokesman Joshua Kodeck said.
