A widespread regional phone service outage that the carrier maintains is not occurring continued to not occur on Wednesday, sources confirm, even as several hundred local residents continued to be unable to make or receive phone calls in the area where the outage is not happening.

The non-outage was first reported to a community Facebook group early Wednesday morning by a resident who noted her line had gone down and that the carrier’s own technician was being dispatched the following morning to investigate. A neighbour replied within minutes confirming that her own line was also down. A third neighbour confirmed she was out. A fourth resident noted that her side of town was “all out too.” A fifth resident, posting from the next concession over, said the outage extended at least as far west as her property.

The carrier, reached via its self-service outage map, said the outage was not occurring.

The outage map, when consulted at the postal code where the outage was occurring, displayed the message “No outages in your area” alongside a photograph of a generic smartphone. When the same map was consulted via a different page on the same carrier’s website, the same postal code returned the result: 521 customers currently affected.

Asked to reconcile these two findings, the carrier said it would send a technician.

Residents have proposed several explanations for the discrepancy, including:

• The outage map only reports outages that the carrier has already officially acknowledged, in which case the map is a record of the carrier’s confidence rather than of network status
• The outage is occurring, but at a level the carrier has chosen not to publicly classify as an outage
• The 521 figure refers to a different kind of customer
• The map and the resident are using slightly different definitions of the phrase “your area”
• The carrier is correct, and the residents are imagining the outage, in lockstep, across six concession roads

At press time, the outage continued not to be occurring. Technicians were en route. Residents who needed to make phone calls did so by walking next door and asking the neighbour whose line was also down whether their line was, in fact, down.

A representative for the carrier, contacted by The Corn, was unable to be reached, on account of the phones.