Phone systems restored, were offline for several hours

Phone systems throughout parts of Mason County were down for several hours Monday night, beginning around 6 p.m. The problem was caused by Frontier Communications making upgrades to its system, according to Phil Truan of Frontier. He said the upgrading caused outages but the company has restored the system now.

Reports came in that land lines were having issues from Grant Township to Riverton Township. West Shore Community College sent an email to employees around 8:30 p.m. reporting the outage. Many MCP readers posted on www.Facebook.com/MasonCountyPress that they personally were experiencing issues or that retailers were having troubles with their phone and credit card systems.

When attempting to call, the caller could often be heard on the other line but could not hear the person they were calling.

A reader had expressed concern about contacting 911. MCP called the non-emergency number at Mason-Oceana 911 but the dispatcher would not comment on whether the system was operational or not and refused to refer us to a supervisor. Typically if the 911 system were to go down, the system should automatically get re-routed into another dispatch center, such as Manistee or Lake counties.

As of 11 p.m., many readers who had issues are reporting their systems are back online.