Many without services after Frontier Communications takes over Verizon landlines

LAKE ELSINORE, Calif. (KABC) -- Frontier communications took over Verizon's landlines, leaving many across the state without phone and internet service.

And now lawmakers stated they may be stepping in to help.

"Whenever there are outages like this, there's a cause for concern because people can't dial 911, there are people who can't get in touch with their children," Assemblyman Mike Gatto of Glendale said. "If we continue to hear these complaints then I think the legislature is going to have hearings, maybe put some executives under oath and find out why exactly this is happening when they promised it wouldn't."

While many residents have been affected, the outages have also hit area businesses, such as Manton Pushrods in Lake Elsinore.

"I couldn't deposit checks, I couldn't do anything with banking for my business," Robin Manton, owner of Manton Pushrods said.

Manton said the company has been without internet or phone services for days, and she's struggled to get an explanation from Frontier Communications.

"They seem to not care at all," Manton said. "A supervisor I talked to two days ago took my cell number and told me they would keep me updated on the status. I have heard nothing from them."

The company released the following statement to ABC7, which said in part:

"We are transitioning more than one million customers in California to Frontier-provided services. With a transition of this size and scale, there will be issues that need to be addressed and that's what we're focused on. Our operational command center is monitoring the network 24/7, tracking every customer escalation, and we have nearly 1,000 highly trained technicians working extended hours to respond as quickly as possible to resolve every customer request as we receive them. We apologize for any inconvenience our customers are experiencing and we thank them for their patience."

While Frontier Communications tries to sort out the issue, some companies, such as Key Data Systems, said the outages could cost them money.

"We have no website, so we have no way for people to access anything the we do right now," Shannon Wells with Key Data Systems explained.

Key Data Systems does consulting for teachers across the country and has been without service since Sunday. With no internet, they've had to do their business the old fashioned way: by using textbooks.

The old fashion way is very slow and costing the company money, Key Data Systems said.

While the company has been able to use cellphones as hot spots, that can be very expensive.

"We've already talked about sending people home, definitely if we're not back up and running by next week, we probably don't have much for people to be working on," Wells said.

Frontier Communications urged residential customers needing assistance to call 1-800-921-8101 and business customers to call 1-800-921-8102.