ST. JOHN'S – Backup systems failed after a fire at an Aliant switching station in St. John's Nfld., on the weekend, leaving about 150,000 customers in Newfoundland without any phone service. Reports, such as this one and this one, say the outage occurred after a fire caused a fibre cable to go down, and so far, Aliant can’t explain why their built-in redundancies failed, with a spokesperson calling it "unprecedented."The outage lasted around five hours during the night on Friday and into Saturday morning.
