Phone lines restored to Oklahoma businesses

Phone service is now working for thousands of Oklahoma businesses, but that wasn't the case at all Tuesday.

Cox Communications shut off phone lines because of a service outage. Businesses couldn't call out and customers couldn't call in.

It was a quiet day at Kline Tools for Secretary Michelle Kincaid. Kincaid usually gets 60 calls a day. Thursday, she only got 7. That's losing 88% of customer's calls and their orders in one day.

Kline Tools President Curtis Kline said, "tens of thousand of dollars of orders are going unanswered and those customers are generally going to call our competition."

Whether you're selling tools or working with tools, a Cox phone outage doesn't discriminate. Tulsa Dentist Michael Toole also lost service. He called the company and was told, "they didn't know what was wrong and they didn't know how long it was going to take to fix."

Toole says his patients couldn't schedule appointments nor could they pay because the credit card machine is hooked up to the phone lines.

Both Toole and Kline took action, sending out a mass email to their customers. The email said to call a cell phone or email them if customers needed anything.

Cox officials still aren't telling us why there was an outage. They sent us a statement that said it isn't a cyber attack.

Kline said, "I thought it was funny the Cox guy said they were too busy to communicate with the customers."

Toole said, "they definitely have some work to do in their communications skills for sure."

Cox's web site indicates this was a national problem affecting more than 14 states.