Century Link outage hits north-central Montana

Staff and wire report

A nationwide problem with service from telephone and internet provider Century Link has included the Havre area.

Many CenturyLink customers across the U.S. were without internet Thursday amid a lengthy outage that even affected some Verizon customers.

The outage began early in the day, but by late Thursday night, the company tweeted that its engineers had identified a “network element” that was affecting services and expected to fully restore services within hours.

Monroe, Louisiana-based CenturyLink didn’t provide details of the problem and it didn’t indicate how many customers were affected. Customers from New York to California, including throughout Montana, reported outages.

Century Link media relations officer Stephanie Meisse sent an updated release to the Havre Daily News at 8:52 this morning.

“Restoring impacted services for our customers is very important to us,” the release said. “We are seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete. Our teams are continuing their efforts to resolve these issues and we will continue to provide updates throughout the day.”

This was in response to questions from the Havre Daily including what caused the outage, how extensive was it, when service would be restored and if customers would see a credit for their time without service.

Century Link sent out a series of tweets Thursday and early today, saying technical teams were working on the problem, tweeting at 8;47 p.m. Mountain Time Thursday that service was expected to be restored within four hours, then tweeting at 3:38 this morning that its teams had discovered additional problems.

“We continue to make good progress with our recovery efforts and we are working tirelessly until restoration is complete,” the tweet said. “We apologize for the disruption.”

The interruption had caused problems with some essential as well as day-to-day services.

The Helena Police Department in Lewis and Clark County also posted on their Facebook page that its 911 center was being affected by the CenturyLink outage. The notice said that cellphones appeared to be working property, but land-line calls were sporadically not going through. The Missoula County 911 has not reported any problems.

In Missoula, the Missoula Federal Credit Union posted a notice on its Facebook page that due to a CenturyLink outage, the bank was experiencing technical issues with its ATMs, the mobile app and online banking via its website.