Business was good at Flowers by Candlelight in Layton Friday. The phones were ringing and employees were taking orders, but about 11 a.m., the store's telephone service went on the fritz.
"We were taking a lot of orders over the phone and a lot of people were coming in," manager Laura Crookston said. "Then we started having problems."The telephone malfunction in the Kaysville and Layton area frustrated other businesses and created other havoc Friday.
Telephones were working, but circuits wouldn't allow callers there to reach any number in the Salt Lake City area or anything in between. Callers in Salt Lake City or the south Davis County area couldn't call Kaysville or Layton, either. Some couldn't reach out-of-state numbers.
"We were trying to call (floral) orders to other states," Crookston said. "One time it would work, another time it wouldn't . . . it cut down on our orders."
Callers found a busy signal or a recording saying all circuits were busy.
"Our pagers weren't working and I wasn't able to make a lot of the calls I needed to because the phones were out," Kaysville Police Chief Dave Helquist said.
Some callers complained that they couldn't reach 911, but for the most part, people were able to get through, police and US WEST officials said. Helquist didn't know of anyone needing emergency services who didn't get through.
Callers trying to figure out what was wrong with the phones may have overloaded local circuits, US WEST spokesman Duane Cooke said. That's why some had trouble reaching 911.
A malfunction at the Kaysville switching office caused the outage, Cooke said. Interfacing equipment that connects the Kaysville office to the Salt Lake office failed.
"We're not sure what specifically caused the interfacing equipment to fail," he said. "That's under investigation." The interfacing equipment wasn't working with some long-distance carriers, either, he said.