Voicemail Outage Bedevils Cox Customers

At the tone, please leave a ... oh, wait, scratch that.

It's Day 8 of the Great Voicemail Outage of 2012, a hardware glitch that has made it impossible to leave messages for a multitude of Cox residential phone customers in Orange County.

Some customers are unaffected or have had voicemail restored, but for the rest no end is in sight, company officials said. Although Cox crews are working around the clock "with the greatest sense of urgency" to fix the problem, it's uncertain when they'll succeed, spokeswoman Ceanne Guerra said Tuesday.

The outage began Feb. 21 and is affecting only residential subscribers to Cox's digital telephone service.

On the plus side, it means not having to listen to messages left by robo-calls and telemarketers.

As a work-around, some customers are using call forwarding when they leave the house, redirecting incoming calls to their cell phones.

"Customers who don’t already have call forwarding can call us at 877-897-2470 to have it temporarily added free of charge," Guerra said.

Just don't try to leave a message. (Kidding.)