Phone fix announced

Officials with AT&T and CenturyLink believe they have found the source of what caused customers to have disrupted phone service over the past several days.

AT&T said that late Tuesday evening, AT&T technicians worked with a "third party" to identify and repair the third party's equipment malfunction. It declined to identify the third party, but on Tuesday afternoon, AT&T officials had said they were working with CenturyLink technicians to track down the problem.

CenturyLink spokesman Greg Gaffke said the problem was a card in its main switch in Jefferson City that takes care of local phone traffic needing to be changed out.

"We're not into finger pointing as to who is to blame for this," Gaffke said. "We feel more testing may need to be done, but for now this apparently fixes the problem, and we apologize to our customers for this."

An AT&T official told a Blair Oaks School District official Tuesday that some of the problems were connected to problems with three deteriorated towers in the area and they were working to fix those.

"This was one of these things that was difficult to troubleshoot," Gaffke said. "There were issues with both services landlines to wireless service and also AT&T landline to AT&T wireless were having problems, but we want to go beyond who is at fault and we're glad the problem was found."