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"This line is temporarily out of order" message

longview1 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:41:23 GMT

I have been receiving this message for about two weeks, when trying to get through to an old acquaintance on their landline. Does the message necessarily "literally" mean what it implies, or could the landline have been completely disconnected? (Customer moved away, changed service provider, etc.)

There seems no longer provision to speak to a human at BT to ask this (or other) simple questions about landlines.

Re: "This line is temporarily out of order" message

gg30340 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:54:29 GMT

It could be either a fault or it has been disconnected.

You could try calling the phone operator 100 to see if they can inform you if there is a problem.

There may be a charge so do not get them to connect you.

Re: "This line is temporarily out of order" message

longview1 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:10:57 GMT

Thank you for your response, gg30340. At last I got through to a human, by dialing100, as suggested (none of the 0300 / 0800 numbers worked). However, he advised the message always did mean what it said! It appears my only option is to write to the person concerned, as there seems no chance of getting an acceptable response from a BT employee / engineer about the true status of the line in question.

Re: "This line is temporarily out of order" message

iniltous — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:55:53 GMT

What you don’t seem to appreciate is BT have around 20% of the market , so calling BT about someone else’s line , statistically they are 4 times more likely not to be a BT customer than be one , and therefore nothing to do with BT , and even if they were a BT customer , data confidentiality etc means nothing much can be disclosed anyway.

Because of these circumstances it’s pretty pointless a BT customer ringing BT about anyone else’s line apart from their own , in this case presumably you dont know if they are a BT customer or not so its a little ridiculous to have a negative view just because you they were unable to help.

Decades ago , when it was a single cohesive network, BT could ‘test’ the other persons line and check if it were OK etc but those days are way in the past .

FWIW, ‘this line is temporarily out of order’ is usually what a caller receives, if they call a number that has an unpaid bill , and restrictions placed upon the line , if it were BT calling another BT customer, but it could also be because the line is faulty.

Re: "This line is temporarily out of order" message

longview1 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:20:16 GMT

Thank you for "putting me right" concerning my complaint! I appreciate the customer confidentiality issue and that the person concerned just might have switched from BT and retained their old number. I guess the problems I've had in getting to speak to a human is the subject of another post. I did get through at the second time of trying to speak to an operator, but at my first call dialling 100, got the same response as when dialling all other numbers found in a Google search: options "1, 2 or 3", none of which were relevant to my call. As explained, the operator insisted the only reason for my problem definitely related to a faulty line (no checks made).