Long Island veterans trying to fill their medicine prescriptions were faced with busy signals because of a phone line outage at the Northport VA.

Army veteran Miguel Estrella said Monday that he had been trying to refill his prescription since Friday. Each time he called, the line was busy. Eventually he drove down there.

"I told them, listen, you know your phones are down?" Estrella says. "They said, 'We know, the phones are down, the computers are down, everything is down.'"

The VA hospital posted an alert on its website that blamed the outage on a failed fiber-optic circuit and said its staff was following communication-failure backup procedures.

Estrella says the hospital should have done more to contact veterans. "They're not notifying the public with what's going on and giving them direction of where to go for emergencies," he says.

No one from the VA hospital was available to speak with News 12 on camera, but a hospital spokesperson told a reporter over the phone that veterans are always urged to call 911 for emergencies. The spokesperson said no veterans were denied care because of the outage and all scheduled appointments were kept.



The VA hospital says its systems were restored by Monday evening.

The outage comes after the hospital was forced to shut down its operating rooms last spring, when black specks of rust and iron oxide were coming out of the air ducts. That problem was addressed and all operating rooms have since reopened.