CenturyLink left customers without Internet for 39 days—until Ars stepped in

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When a severe winter storm hit Oregon on January 13, Nicholas Brown’s CenturyLink fiber Internet service stopped working at his house in Portland.

The initial outage was understandable amid the widespread damage caused by the storm, but CenturyLink’s response was poor. It took about 39 days for CenturyLink to restore broadband service to Brown and even longer to restore service to one of his neighbors. Those reconnections only happened after Ars Technica contacted the telco firm on the customers’ behalf last week.

Brown had never experienced any lengthy outage in over four years of subscribing to CenturyLink, so he figured the telco firm would restore his broadband connection within a reasonable amount of time. “It had practically never gone down at all up to this point. I’ve been quite happy with it,” he said.