Around noon on Sunday, many in El Dorado realized they didn't have cellular service; customers of AT&T, Verizon, Cricket Wireless and StraightTalk were affected, according to reader reports.
Some News-Times readers reported losing service as early as 9:30 a.m.
According to an AT&T outage map, customers in and around the areas of El Dorado, Camden, Magnolia, Monticello, Pine Bluff, Sheridan and Rison were affected by service outages around 4:45 p.m. Sunday.
Merrett Lesley, a public relations manager for AT&T, said the outage was caused by a third party that cut a fiber optic line.
"Service has been restored for customers in the Little Rock and Pine Bluff areas whose service may have been affected due to a fiber cut by a third party. We appreciate our customers' patience," Lesley said Sunday evening in an email to the News-Times.
Representatives of Verizon did not respond to a media inquiry by press-time Monday.
Service resumed around 6 p.m. Sunday for customers in El Dorado.
In Jefferson County, where Pine Bluff sits, 911 service was down as a result of the outage as well, according to reporting by KATV.
According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade organization representing the wireless communication industry in the United States, fiber optic broadband networks act essentially as a middle-man in transmitting data from a person's cell phone to a service provider or vice versa. Therefore, when the fiber line's connection is disrupted, signals can't be sent from the provider to the customer or the other way around.