Historic City News has been informed that the telephone system at city hall is experiencing an outage that, according to the provider, is regional in scope.

Earlier this morning city officials became aware that calling service was interrupted and they reported the outage to the telecommunications vendor.

“The provider has not indicated an expected time for full service to recover,” City Manager John Regan told local reporters. “At this time, if you attempt to call the city offices, you will experience a busy signal.”

Emergency calls to 911 are not affected.

City staff is working first to ensure all public safety issues are addressed and then will be rerouting some department phone lines to specific employee cell phones.

“This way, we should be able to maintain temporary communications with the city until such time as full service is restored,” Regan said.