STAMFORD -- Julie Tunick is a salon owner in Stamford, and she was dismayed to find the phone lines not working late Tuesday morning.
"We're going into the holiday season right now," said Tunick, the owner of La Jolie salon on Summer Street. "I came in this morning and our phones were ringing off the hook. We could barely keep up with the volume and then all of a sudden we couldn't finish our confirmation calls and our phones weren't working."
The business owner took to social media to let clients know that the phone lines were down and that the salon could still be reached through email, text messaging and on Instagram.
"We can't be a day without phones. That's how we run our business," Tunick said.
She wasn't the only one to report phone issues during the day.
Town and city officials across the state, including Stamford, reported their 911 systems were down Tuesday afternoon.
The Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection coordinated with municipalities to correct the issue, said Alexis Steele, a spokesperson for the agency.
Steele said the outages stem from a "commercial carrier equipment issue," and state officials have no evidence that they were the result of a cyberattack.
"We do not have confirmation from every municipality that they experienced issues, but the issue was being seen across the state," she said.
The Stamford Police Department posted on Facebook at roughly 12:20 p.m. that they were experiencing phone issues with the dispatch communication system and directed residents having problems getting through to call 203-977-4921 instead.
"Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, we are still working to resolve the issue!" read the post.
By 3:30 p.m., Stamford Police posted again to say that phones were operational.
Stamford Government Center was also experiencing phone issues on Tuesday. Calls to various numbers resulted in busy signals during the late morning and early afternoon hours.
"I find it very frustrating that Stamford's Government Center is basically offline right now and has been for the better part of two hours," said J.R. McMullen, a member of the city's Board of Finance.
He said local residents could be trying to call the center for a variety of reasons.
"You can't call the Town Clerk office and find out about early voting," he said, citing one example.
In neighboring Darien, it wasn't just the police department impacted, but the schools, too.
According to Darien Superintendent of Schools Alan Addley, their phone lines went down around 12:15 p.m., affecting the entire district, including central services and all incoming calls.
The district was able to communicate using email should family members need to reach out to the district. And there were no major issues as of Tuesday afternoon, Addley said, adding "people have been understanding."
"We've already communicated to our families that we'll let them know when it's back up and running," Addley said.