Saint John cellular phone users are still waiting for an official explanation over why they were without service for about a day last week.

Bell Aliant, Telus, and Virgin Mobile customers were offline from Thursday to Friday afternoon and that caused many cellphone customers to scramble to find other ways to stay in touch.

Rick Meyer and his colleagues at Shift Energy rely almost entirely on cell service to communicate with their clients.

Most of the company’s employees do not have desk phones so the sudden cellphone outage left them struggling to operate.

"I have to respond to my customers’ calls right away, and if I don't get those calls, my customers get upset,” he said.

“So it's important for this service to be up and running for us."

Bell Aliant's office did not return calls to explain the outage.

However, Bell Mobility said in a message on Twitter there was “a temporary tower outage in Brunswick Square.” It took about a day for service to be restored.

But as the number of people replacing landlines with cellphones goes up, outages like this are leaving more people without a way to communicate.

Tracy Bailey, who works in the uptown area, said these sudden outages are more than inconvenient.

"I have a little boy who's getting ready to start school, I have babysitters, I have family and things that may need to reach me,” she said.

“It's very frustrating because I don't know what's going on."

It is unclear how many users were affected but Bailey said almost everyone she works with was off the grid.