WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2025 – Alaska-based Quintillion has completed repairs to its subsea fiber optic cable that was severed by sea ice off the state’s North Slope in the Arctic Ocean. The event happened eight months ago.
Crews aboard the IT Integrity and CanPac Valkyrie successfully recovered, spliced, and tested the damaged segment over the weekend. Internet service providers connected to Quintillion’s network are now reconfiguring systems to bring end users back online. Burial of the repaired section will continue for the next two weeks.
Quintillion President Mac McHale said the repair marks the first phase of the wholesale broadband provider’s broader resiliency strategy. Upcoming projects include a 1,000-mile subsea fiber extension from Nome to Homer, completing a statewide fiber ring to provide route diversity, and a 180-mile terrestrial fiber line between Prudhoe Bay and Utqiaġvik to add inland redundancy.
“As we look ahead, our focus remains clear: to build a more resilient and secure digital infrastructure for rural and urban Alaska,” McHale said. “We recognize the challenges of operating in this environment – and we are responding with innovation, investment, and long-term planning,” he added.
McHale has said he did not think the fiber was severed by a hostile power.
The company dispatched vessels this July to repair the undersea cable lines, which were severed in January 2025. The internet-service provider had to postpone repairs until summer because of Arctic conditions, such as darkness and thick sea ice surrounding the line.
In the months between the January cable break and this week’s repair, Quintillion relied on a patchwork of backup solutions to keep communities connected.
Quintillion lit a temporary backhaul using a satellite ground station in Nome and the still-intact Nome–Utqiaġvik segments of its subsea network. By late February, the company reported that services in Nome were “active, operational, and stable,” with some customers already back to pre-outage capacity.
Over the following weeks, attention shifted north, with Utqiaġvik gaining restoral capacity by mid-March and reconfiguration work continuing in Kotzebue, Point Hope, and Wainwright. By April, Quintillion announced that those three communities were fully service-ready, with adoption ramping up as local internet providers integrated users onto the interim links.
The January outage affected several communities in the North Slope and Northwest Arctic Boroughs. These two boroughs are the northernmost county or county equivalents in the U.S., with a combined land area more than three times that of Virginia and a population less than one-third that of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
This was not the first time a single cable break has disrupted Alaska’s internet connections. In June 2023, sea ice snapped a Quintillion cable 34 miles offshore of the North Slope, leaving many of the same areas without service. That break took three months to repair.