Phone service is back to normal for most places in the state, but for a portion of the day on Thursday, phone service was out for several area government organizations as well as some area businesses. Clearwave reported an outage just after 10 in the morning on their system, but they were not the only ones without service. Cellular Providers AT&T and Verizon both were without service throughout much of Southern Illinois on Thursday. Verizon sent a text message to customers that service may be out for 12 to 14 hours, but service to customers was restored just before 12 noon. It is unclear what caused the outage for all 3 providers.
