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President Donald Trump meets with Congressional GOP members at the Capitol.
MalloryAllen&Tony Langfellow,FOX11News
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(WLUK) — A major restoration milestone was reached Monday in Cellcom's days-long outage impacting customers' ability to make phone calls and send text messages.
In a short update posted at 4:15 p.m., the company says SMS texting and Cellcom-to-Cellcom voice calls have been restored.
"Folks, the work continues. We are making gains every day and we are on the five yard line," Cellcom said.
No details were provided as to when service will be fully restored and back to normal for users. The outage began around 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Cellcom officials say if you're still not seeing your service restored, you may need to re-register it with the network. To do that, turn Airplane Mode on, wait about 10 seconds and turn Airplane Mode off. Restarting your phone may also help.
If those steps don't work and you continue to experience issues, contact Cellcom.
While Cellcom is making progress, the outage has left customers frustrated with the lack of response and communication they've received from the cell phone company. This situation is creating a public relations crisis for Cellcom.
"It's been hectic," Andy Tobias said. He is one of many Cellcom customers upset by the ongoing service outage.
Tobias runs a business called Tobias Window Cleaning in Green Bay and Appleton, and with his phone not able to make or receive calls, it has set his work back.
"If it's only going to be a couple of days, I can hunker down and deal with it. But if it's going to be a month, I should just start transferring what I can to a new number," Tobias said.
He said he recently bought print advertising with his Cellcom phone number on it. He wishes the company would be more transparent.
"The lack of communication, or giving at least some sort of time frame as to how things go or how things should go, is what's most frustrating," he said.
FOX 11 reached out to Cellcom for an interview Monday, but they declined and we were referred to their statement.
The deafening silence by Cellcom is something communication agencies say fuels customer frustration.
"This is going to hurt them," Compass Communications owner Megan Mulholland said.
She said says in a crisis like this, companies need to give consistent updates through the press with interviews and on social media.
"About five or six days into a crisis, we should be seeing a leader, or we should be seeing a spokesperson. So far, all of their responses have been on a website or on social media," Mulholland said.
Despite website and social media interaction, Mulholland said hearing from a specific person is a better look for the company with a plan — creating trust. She said when a company avoids the press, it's often because they don't have a clear resolution strategy and want to control internal messaging first.
"They really need to clarify people's concerns and prevent misinformation, and right now, it's really the social media team that is responding," Mulholland said. "So people are speculating, people are getting frustrated."