Thousands of Hudson Valley residents lost internet, cable and phone connections in a widespread Optimum outage that struck the Northeast. Downdetector.com reported a surge of outages starting around 7PM Friday.

DownDetector.com
DownDetector.com
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Optimum acknowledged the outage but didn't give any indication of the cause.

I discovered the outage after my low gas light came on, and I bounced around three gas stations trying to find one with a working credit card machine. Cashless and running on fumes is no way to go through life in a post-internet world, turns out. My solution was to scrounge through change draws and the bottom of purses until I came up with $8.65 to power my Subaru through the weekend.

Others took a different approach, tying up emergency lines and reaching out to police for assistance. Police in Fairfield, Conn. and Ossining urged citizens to not call them over their connectivity issues.

The outages appeared to subside around 9:30AM Saturday morning. How'd you handle your whole 14 hours without wifi? Let us know in the comments below.

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