Hundreds of Door County residents and businesses found out Tuesday afternoon how life was before the internet and cell phones for about seven hours.

Shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday, Spectrum, Frontier Communications, and U.S. Cellular customers experienced outages due to a fiber line being accidentally cut by a landscaping business. 

Jason Estes, owner of Sonny's Italian Kitchen & Pizzeria in Sturgeon Bay, which delivers a lot, says his business lost its phone service and online ordering capabilities due to the internet outage. He notes that losing the ability to process credit cards forced Sonny's employees to take credit card numbers and process transactions after the evening shift when services were restored at about 8:30 p.m.

Estes says his Point-of-Sale (POS) system has gone down in the past, but the seven-hour outage was the longest he can remember in his 28 years of business. He estimates that he lost about 30 percent of his business due to the outage, but it would have been far worse if it had occurred on the weekend.

Tadych's Marketplace General Manager Jon Calhoun says the supermarket experienced only phone line issues and could operate registers and transactions all day with a secured internet.

According to Business Insider, small businesses could lose $40 million in productivity in a given year due to the internet being down.