University of Iowa Campus Safety restored its phone services at approximately 4:30 a.m. Thursday morning after the non-emergency phone line went out on Wednesday afternoon. 

The UI Office of Campus Safety announced in an email to students at around 4 p.m. Wednesday that it was unable to receive non-emergency phone calls because of a phone service interruption.

Hayley Bruce, the UI’s Campus Safety Public Information Officer, said the telecommunications company attributed the interruption to a damaged telephone fiber-optic cable.

The UI said 911 services and calls were not impacted, however, elevator phones, area of refugee phones, and other non-emergency lines connected with Campus Safety were down.

Bruce said that all of the UI’s phone services are now fully functional.

Bruce said that the outage did not impact Campus Safety’s ability to support campus safety, as they have “alternative communication measures” in place including an alternate phone number for non-emergency business while the line was down. 

Bruce said that in addition to affecting the non-emergency lines, the outage impacted emergency buttons in elevations, emergency refuge phones and other communication tools that connect to the non-emergency phone number.

“This is why we communicated proactively with campus about the outage and provided and alternative phone number,” Bruce said.