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NATCHEZ — Connection has been restored to the many Sparklight residential and business customers who lost phone, internet and video services around midday Monday.

Natchez General Manager John Hilbert said the brief outage had been caused by a main fiber line that had been cut somewhere, causing a widespread loss of service.

Sparklight, a cable and internet provider formerly called Cable One, stated a disruption in phone, internet and video occurred for a portion of customers throughout Natchez, Brookhaven and McComb.

Technicians worked diligently to get services restored as quickly as possible, the company said.

“They switched over to another circuit using redundant fiber to quickly restore service,” Hilbert said. “I’m not even sure where the cut fiber is located. These main lines service a wide area that stretches from here to the coast.”

The damage that caused the outage is still being worked on, Hilbert said.

The disruption started around 10:30 a.m. and the connection was restored around 1 p.m., lasting under three hours. At least one restaurant in Brookhaven had to switch to cash-only payments during the midday outage.

“We were fortunate to have it restored in a short amount of time. It could’ve been worse,” Hilbert said.

Learn how to sign up for outage text message notifications at bit.ly/3KVJCil