Phone, Internet outage may last three days

A phone and Internet line outage on Newport Beach’s East Side left even police cut off Wednesday, Newport Beach Police Sgt. Evan Sailor said.

The 911 system was not affected, but a bug in the phone system caused by the outage at about 11:30 a.m. meant incoming nonemergency police calls were all forwarded to the Newport Beach Library’s voicemail, Sailor said. The Police Department’s Internet connection also went down.

“It took us a little time for our phone guy to recycle the system,” Sailor said, adding that it took a couple of hours to stop the calls from being forwarded to the library.

Lt. Bill Hartford said that residences may have been affected and that the outage may last three days in some areas.

City spokeswoman Marilee Jackson had not heard of the outage Wednesday afternoon, but said she did not believe City Hall was affected.

As of Wednesday evening, a portion of the city still had no phone or Internet service, Sailor said. A Cox Communications construction crew working on Macarthur Boulevard near Prairie Road seemed to have cut the lines, Hartford said.

AT&T; staffers were working into the night investigating the cause and repairing it, said Courtney Bylund, a spokeswoman for AT&T; in Orange County.

“Our crew is on the ground right now and isolating the damage,” she said.

AT&T; officials said they did not yet know how many customers were affected, but Sailor estimated it was “a couple thousand.”

— Alicia Robinson contributed to this report.