Cell phone service was proving challenging in Malibu, where the fire was burning Tuesday.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the fire destroyed the remaining cells in the area, disrupting utilities. It is not clear how severe the outage was, but people in the area reported that they were having trouble making calls.
There are also several power outages in the area of the fire Tuesday morning — some outages for the safety of firefighters and part of a community-wide power outage, planned outages to prevent potential sparks in utilities, according to David Eisenhauer, a spokesman for Southern California Edison.
He did not have details about the fire. Across the state, more than 40,000 customers lost power for the planned outage due to the strong winds, about a quarter in Los Angeles County. Another 200,000 were considered for closure.
It is not clear how many such episodes there are among Malibu.
Officials were bracing for high winds in Santa Ana, saying Monday that more than 350,000 customers from Kern counties to San Diego could lose power during the planned safety shutdown.
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