ARANSAS PASS, Texas — A fiber optic line somehow getting cut led to an internet outage for Sparklight customers in the Aransas Pass-area.
“I haven’t gotten to do anything yet, because I’ve been waiting for the internet to come back on all day," owner of The Addiction coffee shop Tammie Brown said. "So it’s been a little bit of a challenge today."
Teachers for Aransas Pass Independent School District faced a similar challenge with much of their learning materials stored online.
“We had to kind of shift back to some of the old school way of thinking to make sure that we take care of business," APISD Superintendent Cara Cooke said.
Four miles away, the Ingleside Independent School District was unaffected by the outage, because they get their internet service from a different provider.
District leaders say they can only imagine the difficulties their neighbors to the northeast endured Friday.
“When you lose it, you literally — it’s like losing an air conditioning system or getting water turned off at a school," IISD Superintendent Troy Mircovich said. "You have to have it to be able to function today.”
Aransas Pass schools didn't have internet today, but teachers did manage to provide a functional day of education.
"A day without internet is just another day of work," Cooke said. "(The teachers are) all about kids. They want to teach them. They want to grow them. And they took care of business today."
Back at The Addiction, business continued to take place thanks in part to workers running credit cards on their cell phones -- when they had to run cards at all.
"Customers have been really awesome about giving us cash when we were having a little down time," Brown said.
