SARANAC LAKE — A Spectrum outage knocked out internet for some residents and businesses Monday afternoon, but after around three hours, a company technician had fixed the problem and service was back up and running.

Spectrum spokesperson Lara Pritchard said the cause was a damaged service node. At 3 p.m. she said a technician was on site, swapping out the node.

A node is a “service hub” for specific areas, distributing internet services. Pritchard said these nodes are all over. This one, she estimated, serviced a couple hundred customers. She said this node was knocked offline by water damage.

At Nori’s Village Market, the point-of-sale cashier system and credit card machines both went down. As co-owner Ashley Murray rang up a customer around 4 p.m., she mused that this was likely due to Mercury being in retrograde. This astral phenomenon ends today, so she hopes these strange occurrences are over.

Murray said the grocery store and cafe was prepared for the outage because it has experienced POS and credit card outages before. After the last one, Nori’s installed a system that saves credit card transactions to tender after service is restored, but only up to a certain dollar amount.

One group of customers had over $200 in groceries and after ringing all the items through twice, unsuccessfully, they had to cross Church Street to Adirondack Bank and return with a wad of cash.

Murray said she offered them a discount, but the shoppers declined.

“We’re so lucky that we have such kind customers,” she said.

When the outage first started at 1 p.m. Murray said computers crashed and customers of all kinds had to wait in line to check out, but after 30 minutes they got used to the new system. This was right during a busy part of the warm day.