Phone System

Hello everyone, this is my first post here at ATS.

Weird thing happened about an hour ago at my work in South Charlotte, NC. Myself and a co-worker were both on the phone when the lines went dead. For about the next three minutes no calls could be made out. A recorded message said "We're sorry but all tanks are full".

This seemed really odd to be but the phone system is back up and running now.

Has anyone else experienced this today?

We're you calling about getting into any form of tank? Oh Snap! you're an agent of the NWO!

No, that's kind of strange. I've gotten busy signals and cut off before, but I also lived in the country at the time, so I attested it to the ancient technology they had.

Yeah it was really weird. My co-worker actually told me about it first. I thought she must have misheard and it said "all circuits are busy" but when I tried to dial out I got the same message ("tanks are full").

Weirdest thing I've ever heard over the phone. I guess it's fixed now but it was an odd moment.

I'm guessing what it said was, "all trunks are full". A "trunk" is the circuit between the switchboard and the telco office. I'll bet when you make an outbound call you have to dial a 9 to get an outside line.

If you're at a business with multiple telephone sets, that doesn't mean there's a corresponding number of trunks to the telco central office. So if you have more requests for an outside line than you have trunks, your switching equipment can return an "all trunks are busy/full" recording.

If the recording is from the telco, you'll hear a series of three tones first. It's possible that the local telco had a problem at their office. Some radio station running a contest or something loads up all the capacity, but that's rare.

That's interesting, thank you! I was thinking it had something to do with full circuits but as I hadn't heard that particular phrase before I was a little confused. It may have said trunks, that is possible.

Here at work we do have to dial a 9 to get outside which is normal. First time this message at ever occurred. It doesn't sound like this is anything too serious though so thank you for responses.