The plot thickens. I know a bit about the telco industry, I’ve been in it for 18 years. You can’t just “take” someone’s numbers without prior written authorization. It’s a felony.
It also requires the cooperation of the incumbent carrier to ensure a smooth cut over. I know because I do it a dozen or so times every month. I’m not a technical guy, well more technical thank most salesmen, but I’ve been at enough cuts to know how it works.
I’ve had it happen to us several times that AT&T reassigned our numbers to someone else. Not too often, but every few years they would screw up and do that to our business (usually just a fax line and not the main number thankfully). Of course when a carrier does that between its own customers, for one number, it’s probably just a “administrative error”. If it happens to hundreds of numbers across different carriers? That’s something else entirely.
If only you could come out here and fix the downed line a tree took out that AT&T says they will fix the next day. Been on a week now. Power and cable were back within 8 and 24 hours respectively.
I worked at the Pentagon for 3.5 years and retired in 2013. One of my jobs was to monitor the monthly telephone bill and watch over the 500-odd telephone numbers. I came to realize about six months into the job, there were at least twenty numbers which could not be found within the work areas (yeah, I actually did a walk and wasted two entire days making a physical inventory).
So I did something that hadn’t been done in a decade there within that agency....I told the telephone gurus to cut off service to these twenty numbers (we were paying $21 a month for each number). Man, that got a big stink within twenty-four hours.
Half of the numbers dissolved away with no one saying anything but the other half had been taken by people as they left the agency and went to another agency.....some were upper-level people and couldn’t understand how I could cut off their service. I asked them if they worked for our group and they admitted they hadn’t been part of the agency for at least five years.
My guess is that this Tech company got brought in and given numbers back five to ten years ago, and the numbers eventually got used by non-company people as people or functions shifted from office to office or cubicle to cubicle. The company probably did an inventory like I did, and said that if their employees weren’t at that number.....they’d refuse to pay the $21 a month, so they cancelled the number. It might be that simple.