Cellcom reports progress on outage, but voice and SMS services still down for customers

(WLUK) — Cellcom says it has made “meaningful progress toward resolution” however the outage that hit clients Wednesday night time continues to be ongoing.

The corporate’s Friday afternoon replace says its voice and SMS providers stay offline because of a community disruption that started round 9 p.m. Wednesday.

“This outage has impacted our voice customers across our service area. We know how disruptive this has been for individuals, families, businesses — and we’re treating it with the urgency it deserves,” a press release from Cellcom reads.

Our technical groups have been working across the clock to revive service, and we’ve made vital progress behind the scenes. Whereas we’re not but prepared to supply a precise restoration timeline, our focus stays on getting providers again on-line as rapidly and responsibly as potential.

We stay dedicated to clear communication, to our clients, and to doing extra than simply getting service again — however making it proper. We’re extremely grateful for the endurance and assist we’ve obtained from our group.

The outage left many Cellcom clients, together with companies and municipalities, unable to make cellphone calls or ship textual content messages. The village of Ashwaubenon makes use of Cellcom’s mum or dad firm, Nsight, for its landlines, which means taking good care of village enterprise has been a trouble.

“It can be a challenge, certainly, when we’re trying to make outgoing calls and we can’t make those contacts,” Ashwaubenon Village Supervisor Joel Gregozeski stated. “Beyond that, certainly we understand our residents and citizens and stakeholders may find it challenging because they just simply can’t reach us.”

In an Instagram publish Friday night time, the village stated its cellphone service had been restored.

To navigate the problem, the village principally relied on e-mail to speak internally and with residents. Happily, Gregozeski says 911 providers and the Brown County non-emergency line weren’t impacted by the outage.

“Those are the key and critical components, so as long as those are operational, we can certainly make do with this disruption of service for phone lines,” Gregozeski stated.

Small companies, like Pulaski Warehouse, has additionally been impacted by the outage. They depend on Nsight for his or her telephones as effectively. It is Pulaski Warehouse’s busiest time of yr, as they specialise in promoting seeds to farmers in not solely Wisconsin, however within the Higher Peninsula, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

“They don’t know about this power outage, so they were trying to figure out how come they cannot get ahold of us on the phone, and that’s one of the unfortunate problems we have,” proprietor Andrea Downey stated.

Downey says e-mail and Fb messenger have been the fallback.

“A phone is a key thing because you’re on it all day. I mean, usually it’s ringing all day long right now because everybody’s looking for their seed or looking for this or that,” she stated.

Though information, cellular/landline web, iMessage and RCS are nonetheless working for many customers, quantity porting is presently unavailable. Cellcom additionally says 911 emergency providers are totally operational.

Officers advocate clients allow functions and providers that leverage their information community, comparable to iMessaging, RCS messaging or third celebration functions comparable to WhatsApp and FaceTime, to remain related.