Apparently sometimes it only takes one rodent to mess up an entire day.

That's exactly what happened around 8 a.m. on Thursday, April 15, when a Frontier Communications line was chewed through by a rodent, causing a phone and DSL outage for roughly 17,000 customers in Susanville, Chester and Alturas.

"Yeah, it was a rodent that chewed through one of our fiber-optic lines," said Frontier Communications spokesperson Jon Alhart. "We dispatched multiple crews to the area where the line was cut, and we'll have crews working on preventative measures as well."

Alhart said the crews would be installing pole guards to keep any similar incidents from happening again. Alhart said a pole guard is a device that essentially prevents a rodent from chewing through or getting to a fiber optics line in the first place. Alhart said Frontier crews were dispatched to the Bogard Flat area.

"Certainly this is an atypical situation," Alhart said, "but we're taking steps to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again."

Alhart said the estimates from the crews that were on the line was that most communications would be back online by about 1:30 p.m. Pacific Standard time.

Customers in the downtown Susanville area had internet service again about 1:00 p.m., and in the Chester area about 1:30 p.m.