If there is a positive takeaway from Cellcom’s week-plus-long outage, local governments are better prepared if a similar event occurs in the future. Cellcom CEO Brighid Riordan confirmed earlier this week that a cyber-attack was why thousands of customers lost their voice and text services on May 14th.

Restoration efforts have been slow, though Riordan said the efforts should be completed this weekend. While some customers missed doctors' appointments and job interviews, local governments struggled to conduct their day-to-day business. Kewaunee County Sheriff Matt Joski says their county departments focused on emergency calls before troubleshooting other phone lines and modes of communication.

Joski says the critical lesson to learn is to have redundancies in place because, as technology advances, it is a question of "when" rather than "if " the next cyber attack occurs.

Cellcom is conducting a full investigation into how the issue occurred and the cyber attack's impact. Since the cyber attack impacted a different network than where the company stores sensitive information, Cellcom does not believe personal data like addresses and financial details were accessed.