KINGSVILLE, Tx — A big cell phone outage left people in Kingsville feeling disconnected and turned the city into a dead zone. And it isn’t the first time it’s happened recently.
When service is down, there’s one thing on mom Berenice Wilson’s mind: her five-month-old daughter.
“It affects me because I have a baby at home and if something were to happen, God forbid I can’t get ahold of anybody,” Wilson said.
She’s just one of several people who live and work in Kingsville who couldn’t get in touch with anybody on Wednesday.
“We wake up one morning and we’re on SOS and we can’t make any phone calls,” Wilson said.
KRIS 6 heard the outage also affected those living in Bishop. But it didn’t just frustrate residents. Local businesses felt the issue in more ways than one.
Alan Dottie owns Blue Quail Design downtown and said he relies on calls to communicate with clients for a multitude of reasons.
“We lose a whole day's sales. I couldn’t tell the people to ship the merchandise so it got here too late to get to an important show. So I lost money there. Others had to close shops because the credit card machines don’t work, the phones don’t work…” Dottie said.
But Wednesday's outage wasn’t the first.
“This has been happening lately,” Dottie said.
“It happened again last week on the 21,” Wilson said.
The university, the Naval Base and the city were also affected by the outage. All phone systems were down, causing delays in important communication.
Some residents and entities were told by AT&T unofficially that there were cut fiber lines somewhere between Bishop and Kingsville.
“I assume it’s because they have all this construction on I-69 and they probably keep cutting the cables, so I can’t blame AT&T,” Dottie said.
KRIS 6 spoke to an AT&T worker on site who said unofficially that a contractor was digging a hole and accidentally cut one of the lines. KRIS 6 reached out to AT&T for answers three separate times since Wednesday but have not heard anything back.
But they weren’t the only carrier down.
Wilson said she has T-Mobile and they happened to be down on the same day.
KRIS 6 reached out to T-Mobile and received the following statement:
"A couple weeks ago a third-party fiber line recently was cut and needed to be repaired, which temporarily impacted service for some customers in Kingsville. Service has been restored."
But despite some answers, residents like Wilson have agreed that the most frustrating answer is no answer when it happens.
“You don’t get a message from your carrier saying there's an outage or we are working on restoring it. Nobody ever contacts us. You just wait until it’s over,” Wilson said.
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