CenturyLink outage hits St. Charles phone lines
(Update: Century Link traces problem to ‘network element,’ working on fix)
A CenturyLink telephone outage reported in areas around the country has made all landline phones at St. Charles hospitals and clinics intermittently inoperable, the organization said Thursday morning and in an afternoon update. The company said Thursday night it had identified and was fixing the problem.
Cellphones are working, the health system said in its announcement, “and we encourage family members with patients in our hospitals to call cellphones rather than hospital room phones to check on their loved ones.”
The outage started around 2 a.m. and appears to be affecting a wide region throughout the Northwest. National media reports issues elsewhere in the country as well.
At mid-afternoon, hospital Public Information Officer Lisa Goodman said the problems continued: “We typically receive thousands of calls a day, and right now almost none are coming through.”
The hospital said it did not have an estimate from CenturyLink on when the phones may be restored.
Around 9 p.m., the company tweeted, “CenturyLink engineers have identified a network element that was impacting customer services and are addressing the issue in order to fully restore services. We estimate services will be fully restored within 4 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”
Earlier, The Associated Press reported some CenturyLink customers across the country were without the internet as outages stretched from New York to California.
The company said in a statement earlier Thursday that its network was “still experiencing a disruption” and that it was working to restore services. It provided no other details, including how many customers were affected.
Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, said via Twitter that this was a “nationwide outage” and her agency needed to investigate.
It appeared that most of the trouble was in the West.
The Idaho Statesman reported that the internet problems led to the temporary shutdown of phone services at the Idaho Department of Correction and the state’s Department of Education.
There were reports of ATM machines not working in Idaho and Montana.
