Cellular phone service was knocked out in Pahrump Friday afternoon after a fiber optic line was cut. Service was restored early Saturday morning.

"Somewhere in Las Vegas there was a cut to an Embarq cable that was feeding our service in that area," said John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T.

Customers with land-line phones could call locally but not to locations outside Pahrump, Britton said. Cellular phone service was totally out.

During the outage an individual at the local AT&T Mobility office said he had no idea what had happened and was not able to call anybody to find out.

"The reason your cell phones can be affected is because most cell phone networks feed back into the wired network," said Britton later. "There's no direct cell phone path from Pahrump to Las Vegas, you have to go through the wired network to get there."

Service went down about 5 p.m. Friday and was restored about 2 a.m. Saturday, Britton said.

Representatives for Embarq were unavailable for comment at presstime.

Emergency phone services were up and running.

Pahrump Fire Chief Scott Lewis said the outage affected cell phones used by the Pahrump Valley Fire and Rescue Service but the 911 system was still operating.

"From an emergency standpoint, our dispatching was unaffected," Lewis said.

Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo said 911 service is run out of an engineered trunk line.

"As long as 911 works, that's the only thing I care about. If people can call 911, they can get us," DeMeo said.

But DeMeo said he couldn't dial sheriff's department dispatch from his cell phone. He called the Division of Emergency Management to get a satellite phone to place a call outside of the area and ending up calling Goldfield.

Topper Petras, system manager for CMA Communications, said the accident knocked out their digital channels and the Internet.

"Our equipment has to communicate with each other via the Internet. Because it was down, I had to come back here early Saturday morning and program the equipment to get everything back up," Petras said.

When asked if they received a lot of calls at CMA, Petras said drily, "They're not shy about letting us know something's broken."

But that was after service had been restored. CMA customers who tried to call the answering service for help or advice could not get through.