Audio By Carbonatix
Update: Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine announced Atlantic Broadband will issue service credit. See bottom for more.
New Year’s is a big day for cable and internet — you know, football games, holiday Facebook photos, Google searches on hangover cures.
But thousands of Atlantic Broadband customers in Miami Beach were left unplugged for much of the day after a car smashed into a pole near 71st Street and damaged lines. The accident occurred around 1:15 a.m., the Miami Herald reported, but the company later tweeted it couldn’t begin to restore service until Florida Power & Light did its own restoration, which happened around 10 a.m.
Yet customers were still left without service for much of the day, leaving football fans in agony and tourists confused when they were told they couldn’t pay for overpriced South Beach meals with credit cards because of the failure.
By around 7:15 p.m. — well into Oregon’s trouncing of Florida State in the first-ever college football playoff game — Atlantic Broadband reported it had restored nearly all of its service:
But other Twitter users, of course, had their own take on the disruption:
This afternoon, Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine said in a press release declaring that Atlantic Broadband had agreed to “issue a service credit” to residents who were affected. Here’s the whole release:
Follow Miami New Times on Facebook and Twitter @MiamiNewTimes.
