The Bowie area was once again without internet service provided by AT&T U-Verse all day Monday and late into the evening.
This outage that began shortly before 10 a.m. Monday and lasted until 10:30 p.m. was attributed to an electrical fire at an AT&T switching station located at 1666 Firman Drive in Richardson. Two fire companies reportedly responded to the call and found a fire in the electrical room. It had started at a power switch and burned primary and backup electrical systems.
AT&T originally tweeted out it was a lightning strike that caused the fire and outage, however, later officials said that could not be confirmed at this time. Firefighters cleared the scene after two hours.
While the outage affected Richardson and into the Dallas area, it also spanned further into north Texas taking out Bowie’s service through U-Verse. It is unclear from AT&T how many internet and TV customers were impacted on Monday.
Throughout Bowie businesses were without internet service to handle credit card transactions and many other tasks that operate through the service. During the past several months Bowie has experienced multiple internet outages that lasted a full day. Some were attributed to cut lines during utility repair projects, while others were never sourced.