If you tried to load this article and it took three minutes, congratulations—you're probably on Fidium Fiber. The internet provider, which serves over a million homes across New England and parts of the Midwest, went down hard this week, leaving thousands of customers staring at their routers wondering why they pay $80 a month for the privilege of unplugging and plugging something back in.
According to DownDetector, outage reports spiked Thursday evening, with users in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and upstate New York flooding the site with complaints. Fidium's parent company, Consolidated Communications, confirmed the outage in a statement that basically said "we're aware and working on it," which is corporate for "we have no idea what's happening either."
The outage, which lasted several hours for most customers, couldn't have come at a worse time. It hit right in the middle of a Thursday Night Football game, the season finale of a reality show nobody admits to watching, and—most critically for some—prime online shopping hours. One Reddit user summed it up: "I have never felt more disconnected from society, and I was on a family Zoom call five minutes before this."
Fidium, for those unfamiliar, is one of those newer fiber providers that built its brand on being the anti-Comcast. Faster speeds, no data caps, and a customer service team that allegedly doesn't make you cry. Since launching in 2021, it's been the great hope of rural fiber-starved Americans who've spent years being told their only option is a 10 Mbps DSL line from 2004. So when it goes down, it stings a little more.
The company blamed the outage on a "network issue" in a post on X, which is the modern equivalent of a shrug emoji. A more detailed explanation on their website pointed to a fiber cut—a physical line somewhere getting severed, likely by a backhoe, a squirrel with a death wish, or a contractor who didn't call 811 before digging. Fidium said crews were dispatched and service was being restored "as quickly as possible," a phrase that has never once been true in the history of telecommunications.
Naturally, customers took to social media to express their thoughts. One person tweeted, "Fidium down = my smart home is now a dumb home, and I have to turn lights on with my hands like an animal." Another wrote, "The only thing more unreliable than Fidium's network is Fidium's estimated time of repair." And a third simply posted a photo of their router in the trash with the caption "freedom."
For small business owners, the outage was less funny. A café in Portland, Maine, reported losing card transactions for two hours because their POS system runs on the internet. A remote worker in Vermont said they had to drive to a library parking lot to steal Wi-Fi—which, honestly, is the most Vermont sentence ever written. And a gamer in New Hampshire reportedly lost a ranked match, which is a tragedy in a way that non-gamers will never understand.
This isn't Fidium's first rodeo, either. The company has had smaller outages throughout the year, each time promising that reliability is their top priority. To be fair, building a fiber network from scratch is hard, and every ISP has bad days. But when your entire marketing pitch is "we're not like the other guys," customers expect you to, you know, not be like the other guys.
As of Friday morning, Fidium reported that service had been restored for most customers, with some lingering issues in rural areas. The company said it would offer credits to affected customers, which is nice, but also the equivalent of a restaurant giving you a free appetizer after they burned your steak.
**The Take:** Fiber internet is a modern miracle until it isn't, and Fidium just reminded everyone that even the cool new ISP is still an ISP. If your Wi-Fi went out this week, you have my sympathies—and also, maybe keep a backup hotspot, because this will absolutely happen again.