Hurricane-related damage to a regional data center in Spartanburg, South Carolina is believed to be the cause of the widespread, multi-day Spectrum outage that began Friday and continued through Saturday morning.

Service was out across most of Hampton Roads Friday morning, including for customers in Isle of Wight County. Service in downtown Smithfield was restored just before 1:50 p.m. on Sept. 28.

The city of Smithfield announced on its Facebook page that the outage was caused by remnants of Hurricane Helene, and specifically damage to a key hub and fiber optic lines in South Carolina, which has caused utility issues throughout the Southeast.

Charter spokesman Scott Pryzwansky said in a statement at 12:26 p.m. Saturday that “the network lines at our regional data center in the Spartanburg, South Carolina area were damaged by Hurricane Helene.” The network at this location is essential to providing our services crucial in this area. Our technical teams are on site and working to restore services to affected customers as quickly as possible. We are communicating with affected customers about the service interruption and that our recovery process is underway. We apologize for the service disruption.”

Hurricane Helene made landfall over the Florida panhandle on September 26 as a Category 4 storm with winds of up to 140 miles per hour. As of Friday afternoon, the storm had killed at least 44 people in four states, including Virginia, according to Associated Press reports. By Saturday afternoon, the storm had weakened to a post-tropical depression and moved west across the Kentucky-Tennessee border.

While southeast Virginia was never within Helene's projected cone, the cyclone's outer bands passed over Hampton Roads Friday afternoon, according to satellite images on the National Hurricane Center's website.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:05 p.m. to note that service had been restored in Smithfield and the Associated Press reported damage from Hurricane Helene.