FARGO -- Email and Internet service was restored for Midco customers in the Fargo area about 5:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 13, after an outage that lasted much of the day.

The problem began about 8:15 a.m. and shut down Midco Internet service in a number of the company’s service regions, including Fargo. The service interruption affected about 300,000 customers throughout South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota, according to a release from the company.

“We don’t know the root cause, but we have some preliminary causes,” Jon Pederson, Midco’s chief technology officer, said in the release. “We have some routing equipment that routes traffic throughout the network and upon close inspection it was found that to be at 100 percent utilization. We believe there was a traffic loop that caused that utilization to spike and that cutoff some of our network resources.”

At 5:30 p.m., the company said services should be back up, though customers may need to reboot their equipment. The email backlog will be catching up overnight and to have this move along more quickly, Mido encouraged customers to wait until Saturday morning to check email messages.

At about noon, the company posted on its Facebook page that it had isolated several issues and was fixing them, though the root cause of the trouble remained elusive. The majority of services were restored around 1 p.m., the company said, though some outages remained.

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Erin Johanning, director of communications for Midco, said Friday morning that in addition to Internet services the company’s on-demand TV cable service was also affected in some areas.

She said that while Midco’s landline phone service was largely working, there had been reports of spot outages.

Customers still experiencing issues after a reboot should contact customer service.