By Callie Horner and Nicole Puterman

An electrical fire broke out from a lightning strike Monday Oct 15, resulting in a day-long outage.

This affected many people in the DFW area, including several SMU students who live off-campus. The outage caused the students to miss deadlines for homework, papers and other school assignments.

Taran Stahle, SMU sophomore, was almost out of luck.

“I had an essay due last night so I had to sprint over to Fondren at 9 p.m. to type it up really quickly,” Stahle said.

AT&T came out with this statement Monday afternoon:

“Damage caused by a fire at one of our facilities may be affecting internet services for some of our customers in the Dallas area. We are working to restore service as quickly as possible.”

SMU student Allie Schonberg explained how the power outage affected her yesterday.

“I had no Internet, so when I got back to my apartment my TV wouldn’t work or my Internet. So I couldn’t do my homework and missed my favorite show that comes on at 10 o’clock,” said Schonberg.

Schonberg said it was a big inconvenience because she was forced to find other access to Internet service to carry out her routine.

The electrical fire burned the AT&T facility’s electrical room and destroyed the primary and backup electrical systems. No one was injured, but having no internet impacted many.

Stahle was affected by the outage in several different aspects.

“My house WiFi went completely out and we don’t have coverage at all, so I couldn’t use my phone,” Stahle said.

Not only did the outage affect internet connection, but also student safety.

“The whole security system in my house turned off because it’s WiFi enabled too, so all of the locks on our doors didn’t lock,” Stahle said.

After the outage, AT&T finally solved the issue. SMU student Erin Robinson is still being affected.

“The WiFi is back on, but I can’t fix my TV,” Robinson said. “The power outage caused a lot of distress for my apartment.”