Unfortunately, it keeps happening, and CenturyLink (also known as Lumen) can’t seem to explain why. In only the last two months, we heard from CenturyLink customers in three states who were without service for periods of between three weeks and over four months.
In early December, we heard from John in Boulder, Colorado, who preferred that we not publish his last name. John said he and his wife had been without CenturyLink phone and DSL Internet service for over three weeks. …
John also told us his elderly neighbors were without service. He read our February 2024 article about a 39-day outage in Oregon and wondered if we could help. We also published an August 2023 article about CenturyLink leaving an 86-year-old woman in Minnesota with no Internet service for a month and a May 2024 article about CenturyLink leaving a couple in Oregon with no service for two months, then billing them for $239.
The article outlines the trials and tribulations of getting these problems fixed. In the examples given, it helps when Ars Technica contacted the provider. Any company can have an off day, the question is – how or why is it happening? It sounds like one issue is trying to maintain an old technology and grow another technology at the same time…
John praised CenturyLink’s local repair team but said his requests for repairs apparently weren’t routed to the right people. A CenturyLink manager told John that the local crew never got the repair ticket from the phone-based customer service team, he said.
The technician who fixed the service offered some insight into the local problems, John told us. “He said that in the mountains of western Boulder County, there are a total of five techs who know how to work with copper wire,” John told us. “All the other employees only work with fiber. CenturyLink is losing the people familiar with copper and not replacing them, even though copper is what the west half of the county depends on.”
Lumen says it has 1.08 million fiber broadband subscribers and 1.47 million “other broadband subscribers,” defined as “customers that primarily subscribe to lower speed copper-based broadband services marketed under the CenturyLink brand.”