This afternoon, the phone lines went down for most of the Town’s municipal buildings. That includes the Public Safety Station and Town Hall.
Chief Kenneth Paulhus asked me to remind residents that for emergencies they should be calling 9-1-1, which is still working. (It’s just the number for non-emergency business that is down.)
The phone is working at the Southborough Library.
My understanding is that IT is working with the phone vendor on the issue. If there are any updates, I’ll update this post.
Updated (9/27/21 8:33 pm): A code red alert from the Town issued an update that the problem has been resolved.
Amazing and soooo coincidental, that yesterday, the town’s municipal building’s phone service went down, at the same time that Southboro has stated a need for a centralized regional dispatch center. I guess shutting down service is one way of convincing the public to give them what the officials want.
Baypath also mentioned that their phone lines were down. I doubt there was a consipracy with the the Town as well as Baypath. It happens.
Beth, can you get an explanation from anyone on this bizarre situation?
What happened? Have literally never heard of this happening. Can you imagine this happening in Boston? Or Worcester? No. One cannot.
It is odd timing. Coincidence? Or not? IMHO, no such thing as coincidences. But let’s hear the explanation. Not the first time the unexpected has happened hereabouts.
Thanks
Actually, the Town phones have gone down in the past. It’s not new. Since 9-1-1 calls were received just fine, this doesn’t appear to be related to the dispatch center.
I found six other instances from 2015 – 2019 when the Town tweeted that their system was down.
I also recall other times when the school phones were down or the Library phone was down.
The reason I ran a special post this time is because now that the police and fire departments are in a new building, they are on the same phone system as the Town for their business lines. Therefore, this time they were impacted by the outage. When Chief Paulhus reached out to me yesterday, his concern was that even though everyone should use 9-1-1 for emergencies, he knew that some people use the business line instead.
I don’t have details on the specific outage except that it was a regional issue with the service and that IT was working with them yesterday.
Chill people. Phone lines do go down. My dad worked for MA Bell, AT&T and Verizon. It was not unusual for him to get called in to work on phone lines that had gone down in hospitals, schools and huge office buildings. It happens.
Most things that happen in life aren’t conspiracies.