A nationwide CenturyLink outage severed communications to several Idaho agencies and businesses throughout Thursday, including Bingham Memorial Hospital, the Idaho Department of Labor, the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office and the Idaho Department of Correction.

CenturyLink tweeted this morning, “Our network is experiencing a disruption affecting customer services. We understand some customers are currently unable to generate tickets through the CTL help portal. We know how important services are to our customers and are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”

Bingham Memorial set up an emergency cell phone line, which it posted on its Facebook page, to help customers with pressing needs. The number is 208-709-3443.

Hospital spokesman Mark Baker said making new appointments or placing inbound or outbound calls through the conventional phone system was not possible amid the outage.

“We’re still working on our contingency plan,” Baker said Thursday afternoon. “All of our clinics are open and operating as normal.”

Baker said the hospital has internet and phone services through a CenturyLink fiber line. He was notified of the outage at 7:30 a.m., and the hospital’s information technology staff has been working closely with the compnay. He said he heard as of late morning that some CenturyLink services were being restored elsewhere in the country. He’s unaware of the cause of the outage.

Several local business employees and CenturyLink customers posted comments on the Journal’s Facebook page about their experiences with the outage. One person said a local retailer had to phone in every credit card transaction. A few people said they were sent home early from their jobs, with no way to work while their internet service was down. One mother was pleased that her children were forced to take a break from online video games and do something more constructive.

Some local CenturyLink customers said they were still without service as of Thursday night.

Newsweek reported this morning that CenturyLink phone and internet services across the country appear to be affected, with the majority of the outage reports in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest.