The very first reports I received about the outage, coming out of Wickenburg and Prescott, was that the ISP from Century Link went down because a car crashed into a transformer. Shortly after that, reports stated that a construction crew hit a power line causing Internet service to go down. From the Phoenix media, we now know that this was the work of "vandals" who discovered where cables, buried several feet underground,were located in the midst of rough terrain. These "vandals" subsequently cut through the Internet cables which were inches to a foot thick and this was the cause  of this massive outage.

The event had a crippling effect on local communities from central to northern Arizona.

911 service and the communications of first responders were taken down.

Point of sale debit/credit card transactions could not be initiated due to the outage.

ATM's did not work.

Banks were not able to access their computers and were forced to issue paper receipts for any deposit.

All cell phone providers were inoperable except for Verizon Wireless.

Most cable companies were not able to carry programming (e.g. Phoenix TV stations) due to the takedown of live streaming. The same was also true for many radio stations.