Emergency phone services have been restored to several counties and cities around the Tampa Bay Area after an outage took 911 lines down Wednesday.
The problem affected as many as seven counties, including Pinellas, Hillsborough, Sarasota, Manatee and Polk Counties, as well as a number of cities and unincorporated areas.
It was the second outage of the day: officials with Frontier Communications say routine network maintenance being done by telecommunications provider CenturyLink associated with a road project near Clewiston overnight caused an outage that lasted almost two hours.
Then, late Wednesday morning, service was interrupted a second time, apparently due to a fiber cut also involving CenturyLink. The outage lasted from shortly after about 10 a.m. to just after 1 p.m.
During the outages, communities directed people to call their non-emergency numbers or even text their call centers with emergencies.
