Sycamore police phone system back up after partial outage

SYCAMORE – An outage meant part of Sycamore Police Department’s phone system was down over the weekend, but Police Chief Jim Winters said the technical issue did not inhibit the department’s operations.

On Friday, the department began experiencing phone system issues that prevented DeKalb County Communications Center from forwarding phones to the department, according to a department social media post.

“It did not affect any of our operations, and the notice on social media was one of the ways we helped put it out, to remind people to call, that 911 was still operational and they could call the administrative line, too, if there was any issues,” Winters said.

A second department social media post on Monday encouraged the public to continue to use 911 for emergency calls.

“There is no effect whatsoever on 911 calls. Those will still go through.”

—  Sycamore Police Chief Jim Winters

The outage had persisted through the weekend, but Winters said shortly before noon Monday that the system was beginning to be brought back online. Sycamore City Manager Michael Hall said the phone issues were resolved at 4:26 p.m.

“There is no effect whatsoever on 911 calls. Those will still go through, and our administrative line of [815] 895-2123 is still working. And we’re starting to get calls coming through on our normal line, which is the [815] 895-3435 line,” Winters said. “We’re starting to see service come back, but we’re still working on it with the IT folks and also the contract telephone provider.”

Winters said even though he found some services were returning, he was not aware of a timeline for the complete restoration of the city’s phone services.

In an email to the Daily Chronicle, Hall wrote that the problem had not affected all phones used by the city, and officials were still investigating the issue.

The outage began on Friday after multiple power outages Thursday, according to a city news release.

“Frontier Communications, our phone system Telcom Innovation Group (TIG), and our IT service provider are still trying to determine the cause following an electrical black out on Thursday of last week,” Hall wrote. “We have not been given an estimated time of repair.”