The Montana Public Service Commission said it doesn’t know of an outage that has generated more complaints than last week’s outage by national telecommunications giant CenturyLink.
The outage affected phone and internet traffic across the state beginning Dec. 27 and wasn’t fully resolved until two days later.
Despite the record number of complaints, Montana’s PSC said it can do little for most of the unhappy residents because the complaints center on internet outages, something the commission does not regulate.
There has been a steady stream of complaints about the outage, but of the nine official complaints logged, only one had to do with telephone service — a utility the public service commission does regulate, commission communications director Bowen Greenwood said.
The commission does not yet fully understand what happened last week during the outage and hasn’t decided whether to open an investigation,