Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) reported that a switch in South Florida experienced a failure on Sunday afternoon, interrupting service to about 30,000 local business and residential lines in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and surrounding areas.
After working through the night to repair the switch, the telco said the switch is "slowly coming back online."
While service has been slowly coming back on line in areas such as Miami, those that are still without service are, not surprisingly, reporting long hold times of one to two hours on customer service lines. One of Windstream's business customers in Fort Lauderdale, in a post on Windstream's Facebook page, threatened to "switch to AT&T."
Another Facebook post said that service has been returning in phases with full restoration expected by 12:30 pm ET.
Scott Morris, senior consultant, corporate communications for Windstream, confirmed with FierceTelecom the service restoration time and the estimated number of customers affected by the outage.
Update: Facebook users are reporting outages well beyond the Miami area, stretching from Atlanta to St. Louis, Mo. A user said that one of Windstream's customer service representatives told her the outage is "across the Southeast. At this time there is no ETA." FierceTelecom will try to confirm the extent of outages with Windstream.
More FierceTelecom coverage on the multi-state outage can be found here.
For more:
- see Windstream's Facebook page
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