Sprint Voice & Data Down In Minnesota, Washington, Oregon. Alaska Airlines Flights Delayed.

The telecom company Sprint is currently experiencing issues with its network. We first heard reports of the outage on Twitter but a recording message from Sprint’s support line confirmed the issue. The incident is due to a fiber cut and teams are currently working on it. As a result, Alaska Airlines flights are currently delayed until the network is back up because the carrier can’t check in passengers.

The official statement from Sprint:

Due to a fiber cut in the Pacific northwest, you may have issues making or receiving calls, or accessing data services if you are in the Minnesota, Washington, or Oregon areas. The issue has been identified and crews are working diligently to correct the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

According to Alaska Airlines’ status page, a fiber network was cut in Wisconsin at 7:30AM PST. The two companies seem to report different stories, but at least one cable was cut and network issues are real. While the carrier is figuring out a way to manually check in customers, flights are greatly delayed. According to the AP, CEO Brad Tilden doesn’t expect a full resolution before 5PM PST.

Update: Alaska Airlines operations are slowly returning to normal.

Sprint users are expressing their frustration on Twitter — they first had to find a way to send their tweets without using the network:

Sad, boring bus ride today. @Sprint data is down in Oregon this morning. What did we do before internet? @SprintCare

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Kevin Meyer (@Remote__Control) October 08, 2012

So the systems are down for 2 hours or more! Thank you Sprint

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Oromiya Hassen (@ayimororose) October 08, 2012

Sprint data has been down all morning! #Iwantmymoneybacksprintpcs!

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Heliege (@Heliege360) October 08, 2012

Yay. So happy to be flying on a day that Sprint takes down the Alaska Airlines computer system and grounds the entire fleet.

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Nancy DeWitt (@AKbirder) October 08, 2012

Thanks #sprint you have taken down Alaska airlines network so no one is getting out. They are hand writing tickets at the gate!

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Ryan Keyes (@rnkeyes) October 08, 2012

@TechCrunch @romaindillet thanks for the delay to Hawaii jackasses.

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Kevin Rockwood (@photobyrockwood) October 08, 2012