Long-distance telephone and internet service is being restored Wednesday afternoon through much of the Yukon, after a Northwestel fibre-optic cable was cut near Whitehorse earlier in the day.

Northwestel officials say the cable was sliced in two, sometime during the noon hour, by a backhoe working near the McLinton River Bridge on the Alaska Highway, south of Whitehorse.

The damaged line affected service to Yukon customers from Whitehorse northward.

Don Pumphrey, the company's vice-president of information and technology, told CBC News that voice and computer circuits are slowly coming back online as crews work to repair the cable.

In the meantime, the company is rerouting data and phone traffic through microwave networks until all the strands in the cable are spliced back together.

"The way you do glass, it has to be a perfect seam on the splice, so we got to do that all with the right equipment. So it does take a little while," he said late Wednesday afternoon.

Northwestel phone customers in the Yukon could still make local calls during the outage.