Some businesses in Lackawanna County experienced phone issues on Wednesday. It turns out a nationwide Comcast phone line outage affected thousands of businesses.
Comcast phone service issues started being reported Wednesday morning, and by the afternoon, it was a full-fledged problem for businesses across the country and right here in northeastern and central Pennsylvania.
A quiet phone line makes for a quiet kitchen -- not good news for businesses like Minooka Pastry Shop who depend on phone orders.
"Half of our business is phone orders, so we don't have those phone orders now. We don't do internet sales. We have no other means for customers to contact us," Bob Zakreski said.
A Comcast voice outage knocked out business phone lines nationwide right in the middle of the lunchtime rush for Cara Mia's Deli on Drinker Street in Dunmore.
"We try to find our way around it," said Chris Lowe. "We lost a lot of business from it, but we'll make a comeback. We always do."
"It's more a matter if someone wants to order a cake for tomorrow. If it's for farther in the future, it's not so much of a problem. But if they need something for this afternoon or for tomorrow, then they can't contact us that way," Zakreski said.
Some spots like Cara Mia's were able to use social media to get the message out.
"We actually had people messaging us directly through Facebook Messenger. However you can get the message to us, we'll do it. We're a small business, family owned," Lowe said.
Internet services were not down, so social media was a good backup plan.
"A lot of our regulars that I know on a first name basis, they instead came to us, which is still nice. We just hope that we can get the phones back online and get people the service they deserve," Lowe added.