What exactly could happen that would stump "multiple engineering firms"?

https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/local/antietam-still-reporting-internet-phone-trouble/article_31ff8e00-3306-520b-83e4-e9fbba407005.html

Antietam still reporting internet, phone trouble

External influences have been confirmed as the reason behind the disruption of Antietam Broadband internet and phone services, according to Brian Lynch, president of Antietam Cable.

Lynch declined to specify the number of customers, but said that as of of 5 p.m. Friday, Antietam Broadband was still reporting that 18 percent of its customers were affected. The outage started at about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Cable TV service has not seen any disruption.

"There's no common pattern at all" to the outages, Lynch said Friday morning. In some instances, for example, one customer might have service while another nearby does not. Residential and business customers have been affected, he said, as have multiple types of devices.

"If it was a normal outage, it would have been fixed yesterday. ... There's a lot of redundancies built into our system, but all of those are affected," he said.

Redundancies are put in place so companies like Antietam can continue service when part of the system is disrupted.

Multiple engineering firms have been called in to work on the problem, Lynch said.

"They've never seen anything like this, either," he said.

At 7:52 a.m., Antietam posted another update to its website at https://myactv.net/network-status/.

That update reported, "We continue to experience an outage with Internet and Phone services. This outage is still creating an overload of our phones and other response systems, so you may not be able to get through or may experience long wait times.

"Our Engineering team along with other Engineers from around the country continue to work on this issue. This has obviously proven to be a very complex and difficult issue to resolve, but all involved are working around the clock to resolve (it)."

The company said it will offer credit to affected customers once the situation has been resolved. On Thursday, the company said some customers found that a local reset of their modem and a power cycle temporarily may bring their service back.