Juneau residents and business owners say they’ve been having phone problems for the last few days. Both GCI landline and AT&T cell customers have complained of interrupted or spotty service — and it’s not clear what’s causing the problems.
Linda Kruger says her AT&T cell phone has been dropping calls lately, and her GCI internet has also been slow.
“I’m a senior, and I’m worried about seniors. What happens when there’s an emergency?” she said.
Lauren Hulse lives in West Juneau. Her GCI landline stopped working early on Saturday morning and didn’t come back until Tuesday.
“Every day, I’d call them or I chat with them and say, what’s going on? Can you tell me a status?” she said. “They confirmed there’s an area-wide outage, but they couldn’t tell me when it could be fixed.”
Reecia Wilson owns the Juneau restaurants Hangar on the Wharf and Twisted Fish. She said landlines at both locations went down after she got a notice from GCI saying the company would be working on landlines Saturday night and Sunday morning.
“We didn’t realize that our landlines were going to be completely down, and obviously it caused us some issues with the restaurant business because we were unable to, you know, take reservations,” she said. “And obviously the to-go orders were impacted.”
Wilson said her phones came back today after she made a long call to GCI’s tech department.
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, GCI said they had fixed the outage, but customers who were still having problems should contact technical support at 1-800-800-4800 or rcs@gci.com. The statement did not explain what caused the outage.
Juneau Tourism Manager Alex Pierce said she noticed her AT&T phone was slow in the morning on Tuesday, but it was fine shortly after. She said she’s aware of ongoing issues around cell phone service downtown when ships are in port.
“We know that cruise ships definitely slow down the cell phone and internet, especially in the downtown area,” Pierce said. “We don’t know exactly the nature of the problem, and we’re trying to work with cell phone companies and internet providers to figure out what’s going on and figure out a solution.”
Six cruise ships were scheduled in port on Tuesday, with four arriving by 8 a.m. and two scheduled to arrive in the afternoon.
Lt. Krag Campbell said the Juneau Police Department’s dispatchers had not experienced any issues receiving calls as of Tuesday.
Representatives from AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Anna Canny and Yvonne Krumrey contributed reporting.
