Telecom provider CenturyLink left a couple in Oregon without landline phone service for two months, then sent a bill for $239.
CenturyLink customer Kirstin Appel and her husband live in Banks, a city with fewer than 2,000 residents in Oregon's Tualatin Valley. They keep a landline for emergencies because their only Internet service is satellite, and cellular service in the area is poor. Appel said they pay $41 a month for CenturyLink phone service.
CenturyLink phone service became spotty and intermittent around January 20 when winter storms hit the area and then went out completely on January 27, Appel told us. She contacted Ars nearly two months after the outage began, desperate for a fix because her various chats with CenturyLink customer service led nowhere.
The service was only fixed after Ars contacted CenturyLink, and Appel had to spend hours chatting with the company's support to get bill credits. The surprise $239 bill had to do with phantom 411 calls made from her number during the outage (more on that later in this article).
"I've chatted with them multiple times and had two canceled repair tickets since then," Appel told us in late March when her service was still out. She said that customer service reps provided conflicting information on the status of the outage.
"I keep hearing different stories from representatives about how there is a widespread outage in my area—yet no outages are showing up on any outage map that I can find," Appel told us at the time. "One representative even told me that the outage was fixed, scheduled a tech to come out, and then that ticket was canceled without my knowledge. I reached out to CenturyLink today via chat, and they informed me that the outage is still affecting my area."
Not our first CenturyLink horror story
If this sounds familiar, you may have read our February 2024 article about CenturyLink leaving Oregon customers without Internet service for 39 days. In yet another case we wrote about last year, CenturyLink left 86-year-old Minnesota resident Helen Marie Plourde without home Internet and phone service for over a month. In both of those instances, CenturyLink only fixed the service after we emailed the company's public relations department.