BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Many CenturyLink customers across the U.S. were without internet Thursday amid a lengthy outage that stretched from New York to California.
The outage began early in the day and continued into the evening. CenturyLink's network was "still experiencing a disruption," but the telecommunications company was working to restore services, Monroe, Louisiana-based CenturyLink said in a statement.
Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, said via Twitter it was a nationwide outage and her agency needed to investigate.
Late Thursday evening CenturyLink provided further information saying their engineers identified a network element that was impacting customer services. They said service should be restored within four hours after tweeting the update late Thursday night.
The outage knocked out 911 emergency call services in parts of western Washington state. Media reports indicated some CenturyLink customers reported receiving busy signals when dialing 911. Other areas of the country also experiencing 911 outages included parts of Missouri, Idaho and Arizona.
In Idaho, the internet problems caused the temporary shutdown of phone services at the Idaho Department of Correction and the state's Department of Education, The Idaho Statesman reported .
Some ATM machines weren't working in Idaho and Montana.
At North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, Colorado, doctors and nurses for a time had difficulty accessing patient records. Rather than using digital devices, they had to take notes with pencil and paper, according to the Greeley Tribune .
WyoLotto officials said they would postpone announcing Wyoming's winning state lottery numbers and winnings for the day until after the outage was over.
TEGNA Staff contributed to this report.