Sunflower Broadband residential Internet customers will receive a credit on their next bill equivalent to the charge for one day’s Internet access.

The credit comes after most Sunflower customers were unable to access the Internet for several hours Wednesday evening. The outage was caused when planned maintenance by Level 3 Communications went unexpectedly awry and took out one of the main Internet connections Sunflower uses to bring the Internet to its customers.

Most Sunflower customers were still able to access sites hosted locally, including LJWorld.com and SunflowerBroadband.com, while they couldn’t access outside sites, such as Google.com or Yahoo.com. Some access was restored by 10 p.m. Wednesday night, but final repairs weren’t completed until around 2 a.m. Thursday.

Sunflower Broadband officials said it would be some time until they had a cause of the outage. Level 3 officials didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Sunflower Broadband is owned by The World Company, the parent company of the Lawrence Journal-World.