CenturyLink Taking Steps to Avoid Outages

CenturyLink officials say they are making changes to ensure that a multi-state outage that disrupted some emergency services in Wyoming late last year won’t be repeated.

Representatives from the company testified before the Wyoming Public Service Commission on Tuesday. Local Verizon customers, hospitals and emergency dispatchers in several states all experienced lapses in services December 27 and 28. Some residents couldn’t make calls or access the internet for hours.

The multi-state service interruption prompted a Federal Communications Commission investigation. Ultimately, it was determined the outage was caused by a faulty third-party network card in Denver. Technicians were able to replace the hardware once it was identified, but it took longer than expected to troubleshoot.

Community leaders criticized CenturyLink’s limited communication with local governments during the outage. CenturyLink’s vice president of global operations, said the company plans to make changes including more social media alerts and personalized messaging.

The commission will bring the matter back before the public after more investigation. Wyoming Public Service Commission Senior Counsel Chris Petrie says it’s unlikely CenturyLink will incur any penalties.