Vandals cut fiber, triggering Spectrum outage across Buncombe County

Vandals pulled wires down from a utility pole on London Road in Asheville, triggering a Spectrum outage that disrupted Buncombe County phone service and county operations across the region. Buncombe County said emergency 911 communications were not affected, and its public alert told residents to call or text 911 only if it was an emergency.

Buncombe County’s Alert Center posted the outage at 8:00 a.m. on Aug. 4 and said Spectrum internet was down because of a large-scale fiber cut affecting access to county phones and services. The county’s earlier news release said the outage had been reported at 2:30 a.m. and that phones and services were still impacted while repairs continued.

Spectrum later described the incident as a criminal attack on its network. The company said vandals had pulled the wires down from the pole on London Road, cutting service across Buncombe County. For residents trying to reach county offices, the failure left phone lines out of reach even as the county’s emergency system stayed available.

The county’s alert warning became the main backup channel during the outage, replacing normal phone access with a direct message to the public. That distinction mattered: administrative services were interrupted, but 911 calls and texts still went through, reducing the risk that the fiber cut would spill into a broader emergency communications failure.

By late morning, Spectrum internet had been restored after the attack, according to an update from officials. The rapid repair closed a disruption that had begun before sunrise and underscored how vulnerable local communications can be when a single fiber line is cut.

The Buncombe County outage also fit a wider pattern in Western North Carolina and nearby regions, where cut-fiber disruptions have hit other counties this summer. For Buncombe County, the immediate test was whether emergency communication could hold while routine service collapsed, and 911 did.