A severed undersea cable cut off Oceanic phone, internet and many television channels for much of the day across the islands.
The statewide outage affected tens of thousands of people, but Maui County took the brunt of it with up to 14 hours of black screens on most TV stations, and about 13 hours without internet.
"I was kind of disappointed that I didn't get to watch the news and the Regis and Kelly when I was exercising," said Grace Barroga, a resident of Kahului.
"We came in this morning and we have no email, which means no new orders and no communication that way," said Mike Sirutis of Sign Solutions in Kahului. "So can't do much except for what we already have to do."
According to Oceanic, something severed a 3000-foot-deep fiber optic undersea cable off Lanai at around 1:10 a.m. Many internet users on Oahu and Kauai experienced outages for about two hours.
"We had to reroute all of those modems on Oahu and Kauai so they would look this connection back to the mainland," said Norman Santos of Oceanic Time Warner Cable.
Meanwhile all but 19 satellite-fed television signals, plus internet and oceanic phone service to thousands of customers on Maui and the Big Island, remained cut off until the afternoon while temporary redundant lines and different pathways could be arranged.
Oceanic says the last time something happened like this was when the anchoring SBX radar severed this section of cable under Pearl Harbor.
Oceanic says it will take weeks to make the permanent fix on the line owned by T.W. Telcom.
"We have to get a cable ship out here, they have to actually put pontoons on this thing, lift it up from the bottom of the ocean, rework the damaged piece of cable, and only then can we expect to find what caused the cut or the damage," said Santos.
Big Island service was restored by Tuesday midday. Maui County phone and internet was primarily backed up around 2 p.m. and television was around 3 p.m.
"We are concerned about the 911 service that may have been important out there today, we hope that nobody got into that situation," said Santos.
Oceanic says there's a silver lining: They're arranging redundant lines so that there won't be any single point of failure in the future. Oceanic has 413,000 cable, 255,000 Roadrunner and 73,000 phone customers statewide.
