Outages Reported As Verizon Services Move To Frontier
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UPDATED: 04/01/2016, 2:30 PM
FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - Frontier Communications on Friday announced that it had completed a $10.54 billion deal with Verizon Communications to take over the company's wireline operations across Texas, Florida and California. That includes 3.3 million phone lines, 2.1 million broadband connections and 1.2 million FiOS TV subscribers across the country.
Which means that a lot of people woke up angry on Friday when they found their services not working.
As soon as the transition began early Friday, customers in Tampa started complaining about dropped service. Twitter became peppered with reports that were not kind about Frontier's first day on the job. The complaints quickly started to work their way westward, with people in North Texas reporting outages as well.
Many customers snarked questions wondering if this was all some elaborate April Fool's Day joke.
The deal was originally announced in February 2015. "This is a transformative acquistion for Frontier," company CEO Daniel J. McCarthy stated in a news release, "that delivers first-rate assets and important new opportunities given our dramatically expanded scale."
However, customers on Friday found themselves doubting those "first-rate assets."
The outages were not restricted to residential addresses either. The City of Plano said on Twitter that their websites had gone down due to Friday morning's switch. More than three hours later, the city reported that the network issues were "beginning to be restored" but that "intermittent issues" remained.
Frontier apologized to its customers on social media and promised that technicians were working on repairs. The network should be back to normal across Texas with the exception of VOD, which is estimated to start functioning later this afternoon, according to Corporate Communications Manager, Lliam Morrison.
