Cox Business Phone Service Restored After Being Down For Most Of Day

Many Green Country businesses were slowed down by a frustrating problem with their phone service provider Tuesday.

Phone lines have been dead all day for stores with the Cox Communications Voice Manager plan.

Phones are still down Tuesday night, and Cox is working to pinpoint the cause of the outage.

It's affecting businesses from Oklahoma all the way to Rhode Island, and has even affected the non-emergency phone lines for the city of Sapulpa.

At Scovil & Sides Hardware Company, Tuesday, it was anything but business as usual.

The phones are silent, fax machines idle, and credit card transactions won't go through.

"You do feel hopeless, when it's as quiet as it is with no calls coming through," said co-owner Bobby Howell.

Around 10 a.m., Cox Communications business phone lines went dead.

Howell said 30 percent of his daily sales happen over the phone.

"It makes it very difficult to do business without the telephone," Howell said. "When it went down, we've had maybe two calls and I don't know how they come through with all the lines down like they are."

Since phones are a must, hardware store workers are using their personal cell phones to keep up with demand.

"We have a dial tone. We can dial the number, but it does not ring and then in a few minutes it goes to a busy signal," Howell said.

Cox Communication's Facebook page is also blowing up with customer complaints.

Oklahoma Congressional Candidate John Olson posted "due to the widespread outages with Cox Communications, our phone line at Headquarters is down."

Tulsa Teachers Credit Union is also feeling the effects.

"People can call in, but then you can't hear them and the phone drops, so it's been a tough day to communicate," said Kristi Brooks, with TTCU.

She said they're notifying members about the problem through e-mails and on the website.

"It has been down all day, so you couldn't transfer money via our MARCIA online banking system. You couldn't call our call center to have any special things done, so all of that was done either online or over e-mail," Brooks said.

Brooks said TTCU saw a lot more walk-in customers than normal Tuesday.

Cox released a statement Tuesday, after 9 p.m., saying the phone lines had been restored, but that they were going to continue to test them to make sure they were stable.

A spokesperson for Cox said:

"All service has been restored for Cox Business VoiceManager customers impacted during the recent outage. However, we continue to work to test the restored system and ensure it remains stable. Some customers may experience intermittent service and technical issues as we continue to closely monitor the system while we work with our technicians, engineers and vendors to ensure the service remains restored. Customers looking for updates can visit this link where we will post information as needed."