28,000 Temporarily Lose Phone Service
Telephone service was interrupted Thursday to as many as 28,000 customers in north Long Beach and Bellflower, a GTE California spokesman said.
A computer failed in the utility’s central switching station in North Long Beach at 10:18 a.m., causing loss of service to many of the 27,584 customers in that service area, said GTE spokesman Larry Cox. Included were telephone numbers in the 213 area code that started with prefixes of 422, 423, 428 and 984.
In an unrelated incident about the same time, private contractors accidently severed an underground telephone cable in Bellflower that cut service to about 1,000 customers, Cox said. The non-working phones included customers with prefixes of 866, 867, 920, 925 and 804.
Long Beach service was restored at 5 p.m. Thursday, and crews were working through the night to restore service to Bellflower by noon today, Cox said.
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