Every school in the Hanover School Division lost internet services at 3 PM on Tuesday after a fiber optic cable in Winnipeg was mistakenly severed by a construction crew.

Chris MacKinnon, the Director of Technology Services for the Division notes that MTS worked a tireless 16 hours in order to fuse hundreds of individual fiber strands back together for 8:15 Wednesday morning.

According to MacKinnon all of Hanover's fiber optic cables are all connected to a service provider called Merlin that is based out of The University of Manitoba. Merlin provides internet to 95 percent of divisions in the province, many of which were also affected by this outage.

“The fiber is quite literally pieces of glass, so you can’t bend them," explains MacKinnon, "If you have any sort of pressure or contact there is always the risk of breaking or damaging it.”

Hanover is a massive municipality that extends about 40km from Steinbach in either direction, so MacKinnon says standard network cabling does not suffice.

MacKinnon states that fiber optics are typically a very consistent, fast, and reliable form of data transportation over a long distance. Tuesday's problem was an outlier.

“We’ve been blessed in Hanover and haven’t had a whole lot of fiber optic challenges in the past,” comments MacKinnon, “we did have it cut once several years ago, [but] it was resolved in 8 hours.”

MacKinnon admits he is glad that the majority of the outage took place conveniently after the school day was over. Still, he notes they would be able to cope if it happened during regular hours.

“It would almost be going back to the old-school way of using pencil and paper and so on. It would not be ‘mission critical’ but it would certainly cause an inconvenience if we had an outage during the day.”

A loss of internet in the division would mean a loss of access to useful resources like Google and PowerSchool. However, MacKinnon says schools do have paper copies of most essential documents so if people needed information they would likely be able to pull it from other sources.