Centurylink, like most legacy bell LEC providers are simply bureaucratic more than they are technical or support driven, and certainly this happens at them. It's why when these happen, they are almost comically absurd as no one even knows what to do usually, or silo'd to the point they can do nothing to cut red tape.<p>A few months ago, my Centrylink DSL router started rebooting every night at right around 3am, like at 3:06, 3:26, etc, but not before or after 3 and 3:30am, far too regular for it to be a real outage. Being a network engineer by trade (and having worked for several cable isp's), this told me provisioning was doing something, but why out of nowhere?<p>Calling CL twice and talking to clueless monkeys got me nowhere or hung-up on getting transferred around, until finally randomly I got a competent support human that listened to my logic, agreed it was probably a provisioning thing, and dug until he found out it truly was a provisioning thing, that my modem somehow was missing some attributes that was causing it to be reprovisioned nightly (at 3am when those jobs kick off, go figure).<p>Most would probably assume it's a "bad connection" or something, and at 3am when asleep probably not even notice in perpetuity, but this is the sort of thing you have to expect when dealing with a telco/lec provider. Being my job and hobby, I run a network monitoring at my house that would alert me to such things with timestamps as proof, but how many else would notice to correlate events themselves?
Having worked in telephone construction (including on a Centurylink contract), your next step after customer service fails should be your state's public utility commission. PUC complaints light fires under asses. Dead phone lines were not tolerated for us (due to, obviously, customers can't call for help if something happens), and you don't need a bonafide copper splicer to make a temporary repair to get customers back in service.
A rural friend of mine just had CenturyLink buy his local broadband provider and end his service after 15 years. The infrastructure is in place and working, but the lines will go dead this month. The CS reps he spoke with were all obviously coached on the language to use when talking with him. I've given my friend FCC and state rep contact info, but as of right now his only option is starlink.
CenturyLink also had a recent outage that caused 911 calls to stop working for Las Vegas, the state of South Dakota, and other areas. They blamed it on a third party light pole installation but it's being investigated.<p>Seems insane to me that a single line being severed could bring down 911.
I don’t understand how a utility loses this much money:<p><a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LUMN/lumen-technologies/net-income" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LUMN/lumen-technol...</a><p>What a terribly run business.
I wish I were authorized to talk about our metro area's CenturyLink experiences during and after the 2024 winter storm. This article is probably the best story CenturyLink could have hoped for.<p>If you are doing business with CenturyLink (dba Lumen), migrate away from them as soon as feasible.<p>PS: While you're doing business with them, check your billing closely every month or two, especially if you're a large corporate customer.
Lumen is a dead company walking.<p>Level3's autocratic-yet-incompetent philosophy as espoused by their garbage-tier middle mangement, took over after Jeff Storey became CEO and it's been downhill ever since.<p>You can see a lot of parallels between the Level3/CenturyLink merger and the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing merger.
They're pretty horrible.<p>I signed up with them and didn't get <i>actual</i> service for a month because the first tech didn't do anything (as confirmed by the second tech) and I couldn't take time off work to let them into the apartment for them to determine why it wasn't working for a while. Still charged me full price for the first month though.<p>The whole thing was pretty dodgy to begin with as someone with an AT&T shirt showed up at my door trying to sign me up for "internet" and, after figuring out what they were really selling and telling them I owed CenturyLink money, said "that's not a problem" so I'm like "fuck yeah, sign me up". No clue what he did to get me service but I'm sure he got paid just like the first tech who's inaction was found out too late to reverse their payment for "service" according to the second tech.<p>Eventually I couldn't pay the bill and they <i>tried</i> to collect but apparently couldn't even prove I signed up after I innocently asked why they're trying to collect a debt that was something like eight years old. Incompetent company meets irresponsible consumer...
I wonder if the 411 and 911 calls were due to pulse dialing triggering on an intermittent connection. There are probably a few other folks of my age who remember discovering that you could dial a phone by tapping the hook at the right speed - after all, all that a rotary phone dial does is disconnect and reconnect the line at about 10Hz. If a wire was just loose enough that it was disconnecting intermittently, I would expect the pulse detector on the other end to detect a lot of 1s, a much smaller number of 4s, and very few 9s.