While many people don’t use landline phones anymore, some users in Oregon were left shocked after a recent incident. Telecom provider CenturyLink left a couple in Oregon without landline phone service for two months, then still sent a bill for over $200.
CenturyLink customer Kirstin Appel lives in Banks, Oregon, a small city with fewer than 2,000 residents. She and her husband decided to keep a landline in case an emergency were to happen because their only Internet service is satellite and cellular service in the area is poor.
The couple pays $41 a month for CenturyLink phone service but things changed in early 2024. Around January 20, CenturyLink’s phone service became spotty when winter storms struck the area. The service went out completely a week later on January 27, 2024.
Appel contacted Ars nearly two months after the outage began, desperate for a fix because her various chats with CenturyLink customer service led nowhere. The service was only fixed after Ars contacted CenturyLink and Appel spent hours talking with the company’s support to get bill credits.
Appel’s phone service was finally fixed on March 27 but was shocked when she received a bill listing new phone service charges of $298.55, mostly due to 43 calls allegedly made to 411 directory assistance during the outage. The calls were billed at $5.49 each.
“CenturyLink never offered to cancel my bill or offered to give me credits directly whenever I explained my situation. To get credit or bill cancellations, I had to go through the customer service chat each time I wanted to do that,” Appel said.
Appel said she had to spend over two hours in a chat with CenturyLink support to get the 411 call charges reversed. That’s in addition to the time she spent earlier obtaining bill credits while the outage dragged. Appel said it was frustrating that she “had to personally ask for these charges to be canceled” given that “it was impossible for those calls to have been made by me while my line was out of service.”
After being a CenturyLink customer since 2016, Appel said she didn’t previously have any major troubles with the company. “I’m actively looking at other companies who might be able to fulfill my needs for a landline or something similar I can use in a power/Internet outage,” Appel said. “CenturyLink has broken whatever trust or confidence I had in them, and I’m very wary of continuing to pay them my money.”