[MIsunshine]

"Phones still working. the phones still worked because they run off of dc and the offices that feed your phone line have huge banks of batteries as well as generator backup for situations like this"

We lost power AND phone service AND cell phone service about 4:15 south of Detroit. Got nothing but a weird busy signal (not the usual busy signal) for 20 minutes with both regular & cell phones. I thought someone took down the Sprint tower about a quartere mile from my house & that in turn took down phone & electrical lines. Not the case.

Any idea why we lost ALL power, regular, & cell phone service?

Regular phones work now, but cell phone circuits are overloaded & still no power, probably not til tomorrow at the earliest.

Local ABC & CBC from Windsor are both off the air.

[Petronski]

If you got a 'wierd busy signal' then the phone service was NOT down, but they probably DID lose a digital switching center and have no way to route your call. If the phone service were dead, you would hear an empty line, or nothing at all.

[paladinkc]

The cell towers work quite differently, regular land lines are the ones that have a battery backup, the fast busy you were probably getting was due to swamped phone lines, the fiber optic networks probably took a blip or two as a result of this until the phone co's offices got their generators online, and those run everywhere, cell towers might be the last of your phone service to come back on dependant on if that tower has generator backup or not