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by Ashley Kaster, Mallory Allen & Tony Langfellow FOX 11 News
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(WLUK) — Cellcom says it has made "meaningful progress toward resolution" but the outage that hit customers Wednesday night is still ongoing.
The company's Friday afternoon update says its voice and SMS services remain offline due to a network disruption that began around 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 statement from Cellcom reads.
The outage left many Cellcom customers, including businesses and municipalities, unable to make phone calls or send text messages. The village of Ashwaubenon uses Cellcom's parent company, Nsight, for its landlines, meaning taking care of village business has been a hassle.
"It can be a challenge, certainly, when we're trying to make outgoing calls and we can't make those contacts," Ashwaubenon Village Manager Joel Gregozeski said. "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 post Friday night, the village said its phone service had been restored.
To navigate the issue, the village mostly relied on email to communicate internally and with residents. Fortunately, Gregozeski says 911 services 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 said.
Small businesses, like Pulaski Warehouse, has also been impacted by the outage. They rely on Nsight for their phones as well. It's Pulaski Warehouse's busiest time of year, as they specialize in selling seeds to farmers in not only Wisconsin, but in the Upper 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," owner Andrea Downey said.
Downey says email and Facebook 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 said.
Although data, mobile/landline internet, iMessage and RCS are still working for most users, number porting is currently unavailable. Cellcom also says 911 emergency services are fully operational.
Officials recommend customers enable applications and services that leverage their data network, such as iMessaging, RCS messaging or 3rd party applications such as WhatsApp and FaceTime, to stay connected.