“Catastrophic” outage for Payless Cellular customers

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The last thing you need if you’re a small business or consumer is for your cellphone carrier to experience what it calls a ‘catastrophic network failure.’ But when customers of Payless Cellular, a Southern California company, tried to make calls last week, they couldn’t. They were told that their service had been disconnected. When they visited the company’s website, they learned that at 10 a.m. last Tuesday, Payless had ‘experienced a catastrophic network failure which caused an interruption of cellular service.’

No problem, you say. Phone networks go down from time to time, and then they go back up again an hour or two later. But Payless Cellular was down until Saturday, according to Steve Hodjati, a manager at Cellular Fantasy, a Santa Monica store that sells plans on the Payless network. Hodjati said he didn’t know why the network went down or how to contact Payless Cellular.

‘It was a glitch,’ he said Friday evening at his store, which was open past its normal business hours, as associates sat on desks looking tired and an older couple tried to get their phone restored. The couple didn’t want to comment about Payless Cellular or Cellular Fantasy because they said they were otherwise happy with their experience.

But many customers didn’t have patience for the four-day glitch. A manager at the Verizon Wireless store across the street said that ‘dozens’ of Payless customers had come in to switch their phones to ...

... the Verizon network or to ask for help. Payless is a ‘reseller’ of Verizon’s network, according to Hodjati.

‘I’ve lost calls, I’ve missed deadlines,’ said Mark Ryavec, a consultant who switched from Payless to Verizon on Saturday. ‘This is bad for my reputation.’

Ryavec said he had been reasonably happy with Payless and paid only $39 a month for his service. But lately, he’d been getting frustrated with the company. His last bill was $250, but when he tried to figure out why it was so expensive, he discovered that Payless had stopped sending him records of his calls. They told him he had to look the information up online.

He was even more frustrated with Payless on Wednesday after a representative blamed Verizon for the outage. When he tried to call back later in the week, he couldn’t get through to a person.

‘If they’d just shown a level of professionalism, it would have been less frustrating,’ he said.

It’s a bit of a mystery who runs Payless Cellular. Its website says it has been active in Southern California for more than 20 years, and that the outage affected ‘many thousands’ of customers. But the voicemail of one of the contacts on its website says he works for Cellular Fantasy, the Santa Monica store, not Payless Cellular. Someone answering the phone at the Cellular Fantasy store this morning said she had no information about the relationship between the two and hung up when she was asked more questions. The California Secretary of State’s Business Search website has no record of a company called Payless Cellular.

Calling any of the numbers listed on the Payless website didn’t solve the mystery: Callers were sent to a message saying Payless was aware of the service disruption, but it left no options for customers to speak to a representative. The message was still live this morning.

-- Alana Semuels