DES MOINES, Iowa — A water pipe break at Lumen Technologies last Thursday left people across Iowa without internet and phone service.
While the company said most consumer broadband services were restored that night, multiple local businesses say they actually didn’t get phone service back until this week.
Local 5 checked in with one of those businesses, Noah’s Ark Restaurant, whose phones weren't back up until Tuesday afternoon. And with the outages, that time without phones meant lost business.
Owner James Lacona estimates their takeout orders were down by 95% because of the phone outage.
“We barely did any on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Saturday picked up a little bit because people were used to the outage,” he said.
The restaurant is closed Sunday through Tuesday, and reservations were scarce too.
“Reservations, when we usually have a full page of reservations, we had maybe four and those were ones that had been called in before the outage," Lacona said.
He believes that dine-in traffic was cut in half for three days.
“The ones that live nearby knew that we were here and just came on in. People that maybe live further out in the suburbs didn’t want to make the trek in in case we were closed for whatever reason," Lacona said.
That also meant fewer tips for servers.
“It would be like if you were to work a nine-to-five and were to get paid for half your shift yet you were still there the whole time," Lacona said.
He felt largely left in the dark about what was happening. When Lacona reached out to customer service, he was met with confusion. The person on the other line seemed to be completely unaware of the situation.
“In this industry, it would be like if you ordered your dinner and half the dinner came out and then nobody could tell you where the rest of everybody’s dinner was and then you ask ‘Okay is it coming?’ and then nobody would answer," he said.
Noah’s Ark isn’t the only business who said the service disruption had a big impact on business. B&B Grocery Meat and Deli thinks they lost about one-third of what they'd usually make for four days.
Zzz Records got phone service back around 5 p.m. Thursday and Andy's Frame Shop got phone service back on Wednesday.
Zzz Records sent Local 5 a statement saying that, while it did affect business, they probably weren't as impacted as other places.
Andy's Frame Shop told Local 5 that the outage was a pain but didn't have an impact beyond that.