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The story
History
Cellcom's parent company, Nsight, was founded on March 10, 1910, when a group of Pulaski business people met at the local drug store to discuss providing telephone service to their growing community. From that meeting, the Pulaski Merchants and Farmers Telephone Company formed.
In 1968 the company's name changed to Northeast Telephone Company. Northeast Communications, Inc. was formed as a holding company in 1982, and Northeast Telephone Company became a subsidiary. In 1999, Northeast Communications of Wisconsin, Inc. began doing business as Nsight. Today, Nsight's subsidiaries include Cellcom, Nsight Telservices and Nsight Tower.
Nsight has been a family-run business since 1923.
2025 Service Outage
On the evening of Wednesday, May 14, 2025 Cellcom's network went down, and it included their call center phones as well. In the evening Cellcom first put out a message on social media acknowledging the outage.
On Thursday, May 15, 2025 in the morning Cellcom updated their outage to confirm that SMS services were also down, however did say that Data, iMessaging, and RCS messaging was unaffected. They stated that 911 emergency services continued to be available.
On Thursday, May 15, 2025 Cellcom created their Service Announcement Page regular communication to provide an official record of all communications about the outage, and provide ongoing updates.
On Thursday, May 15, 2025 Cellcom said " What initially appeared to be a short-term problem has become a more complex challenge, requiring additional time to resolve." indicating that the outage would be on going.
On Friday, May 16, 2025 Cellcom announced the following message on the newly created Service page (cellcom.com/service), which documents all messages about the outage.
Read the full text
"We know we missed our midday update — and we’re sorry for the delay. We said we’d share more today, and we’re here to do just that.
A portion of our voice services has been successfully restored, marking an important milestone in our recovery efforts. While this update may not yet impact all customers, it is a meaningful step forward — and a sign of the real momentum happening behind the scenes. Activations are continuing in real time as restoration work progresses. We know this isn’t enough. Full restoration remains our top priority, and while we still can’t provide a firm timeline, progress is steady and significant. Our teams continue working 24/7 to bring everyone back online.
This isn’t just about returning to service — it’s about making things right. We are committed to earning back your trust and will share more soon on how we plan to support and stand by our customers through this."
In the following messages sent out by Cellcom, they continued to emphasize they have restored some voice services, and no customer data was compromised. Based on the latest update on May 17, 2025 at 1:15PM, most lines of service have not been restored yet, and they continue to say there is no estimated time for full service restoration.
On May 19, 2025 Cellcom restored SMS and internal (Cellcom to Cellcom) calling.
On May 20, 2025, Cellcom/Nsight CEO Brighid Riordan released a YouTube video and written statement saying that the outage was due to a "security incident", alluding to that their voice and SMS systems were either hacked or subject to ransomware. She does not know when full services will be restored.
On May 27, 2025 Cellcom was able to restore SMS and internal and external calling for customers.
On May 30, 2025 Cellcom announced that they will be automatically crediting accounts for the outage, and for eligible customers, would be doing a "Double the Downtime" offer to receive a second credit for the outage.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cellcom (United States), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4