RadioLink Internet shut down without warning after emailing customers last week that service was ending immediately, and for Allison Ludeman the change became real the moment she came home from work on June 1 and found her internet was out.

The outage hit customers spread across roughly 5,000 square miles in southern Minnesota, a wide rural footprint where the company had become part of daily life. Ludeman said she had relied on RadioLink’s fast service during the COVID-19 pandemic to work remotely and to make her phone function better, which made the loss more than an inconvenience. “Where I live, my cell phone barely works without internet. It’s a pretty critical need,” she said.

Daniel Petsinger, who ran RadioLink Internet from his home in Ellendale, Minnesota, said a changing political climate in some of the communities the company served and a declining customer base pushed him to close the business. He also said in an email that cities including Ellendale and New Richland violated the Telecommunications Act of 1996 by, in his words, shutting down broadband competition. The company’s sudden disappearance also took down its website, phone lines and email, cutting off the usual ways customers might have sought help.

That abrupt ending did not sit well with everyone. Tyler Lendt said the New Richland city council voted in May 2026 to remove RadioLink’s equipment from its water tower with a 60-day notice, and he said that decision was based on making sure the city was fairly compensated and protecting one of its most important pieces of infrastructure. Petsinger said customers wanted advance notice, but Ludeman said she never received an email telling her the shutdown was coming.

For Ludeman, the damage was immediate because she and one of her neighbors had already paid in advance for service. She said it would have helped to have time to find another plan and said it would be nice if Petsinger refunded the fees already paid. Petsinger said customers seeking refunds should direct questions to the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court, leaving the people who lost service with a shutdown, a bill already paid and no clear answer about how many customers were left offline.