Some restaurants, other WOW customers still without phone/internet service
Friday evening update: If you want to order dinner carryout tonight in the Evansville area, you might need to do it in person.
Although internet and phone service has returned for some residents who use WOW, some restaurants remain without phone and internet service at one of their busiest times of the week.
In some cases apps and phone numbers are simply not working, but at least one food ordering app — Click4AMeal — appears to take orders but they aren't received by the restaurant.
Original story: Several Evansville businesses — and scores of individual customers — are still experiencing phone and internet disruptions after Wednesday's service transition from WOW to Astound Broadband.
A customer-service representative with Astound said the service disruption is affecting all Indiana WOW customers and is the result of the migration of WOW's database to Astound. He said the issue is not only affecting customers but also internal Astound networks in Indiana.
More: Here's what Evansville's Wow customers can expect under system's new RCN ownership
The rep said the disruption is affecting "thousands" of customers in Indiana, including businesses.
Astound Broadband, which does business as RCN, Grande Communications and Wave Broadband, acquired the Evansville assets of WOW Internet, Cable & Phone in 2021 in a $661 million deal.
There's no confirmed end to the service disruption. The Astound rep said Thursday afternoon the problem could be cleared up by that evening, but as of noon Friday, a litany of complaints about the outage were being made via Twitter.
Kendall Paul, the chief executive officer at Vanderburgh Humane Society, which uses WOW for its telephone and internet service, has had its phone lines and internet down since Wednesday.
Paul said she reached out to Astound's customer service Wednesday but only got their automated system, which read a message alerting to an outage in the humane society's area. She said she got an automated call from Astound's customer service on Thursday announcing that the outage had been resolved, but the shelter was still experiencing a complete outage.
Paul said the outage is affecting the humane society's ability to do business.
"We are in the middle of an 'Empty the Shelter' adoption event, so we're very busy," Paul said. "We are trying to adopt out animals and not being able to use the internet and not being able to have people be able to call us is causing some problems for sure."
John Voliva, co-owner of Hook's Apothecary in Evansville, said the most frustrating part of the ordeal is the lack of communication from anyone at Astound.
Voliva said he couldn't get through to anyone with the company's tech support and only saw a confirmation of the outage on their side by Wednesday evening — nearly a full business day's worth of time since the apothecary's service went down.
He said he'd known that the service was changing hands between WOW and Astound, and had received communication from the company on things like billing changes, but hadn't heard anything about the possibility of service interruptions.
Voliva had to reroute calls to the apothecary to his personal cellphone, where he's had to answer hundreds of calls from customers.
The incident has made him want to change service providers.
"Once we get out from underneath everything today, I'm going to reach out to AT&T and Spectrum about switching service," Voliva said. "We can't put up with this. I mean, here we are at 4 p.m. ... and we still have no idea when everything is coming back up."
Contact Ray Couture at rcouture@courierpress.com or on Twitter @raybc94
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Thousands of Evansville broadband customers coping with Wow outage
