Multiple areas impacted by Wednesday’s phone outage

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (KSNB) - For more than an hour Wednesday morning, people in central Nebraska may have had some trouble getting through to other people on the phone.

Post after post on social media highlighted a phone outage affecting communication center administration and 911 lines for Hall County, Howard County and Gosper County to name a few.

There was also trouble with phone lines at schools within the Northwest Public School District.

Hall County Emergency Manager Jon Rosenlund said around 10 a.m., they started to notice they weren’t getting calls consistently and heard from Howard County that they weren’t getting 911 calls.

He said it was a little challenging to figure out if it was a 911 problem or something bigger.

The 911 center was getting some calls and others not. He said it appeared to be affecting anything that was landline.

“Cellphone to cellphone was the most reliable method,” Rosenlund said.

They contacted local partners like the fire stations, police and hospitals and learned that this was a regional issue.

“It was so widespread,” he said.

He said he called the number for Lumen Technologies (CenturyLink) to see if they were aware and all the technicians were occupied. They were working on the problem.

Operations returned to normal around 11:30 a.m.

Rosenlund said with it being so widespread, he’s guessing it was a phone company issue, but has yet to learn that exact cause of the outage.