The failure of a communication node in Watson Lake at 8 a.m. Wednesday caused yesterday's day-long heartache with cell phones and some banking services.

Northwestel Inc. spokesman Eric Clement said this morning the failure affected Latitude customers using older model or flip-up cell phones in Watson Lake, Whitehorse and Fort Nelson, B.C.

It did not affect smart phones, as those devices are serviced by a different communication line, he said.

Clement said the rural communities were also not affected, because they too are serviced by a different line.

The outage, Clement explained, affected cell phone to land line calls, or land line to cell phone calls, but did not affect Northwestel's cell-to-cell service.

The Star, however, has heard from a couple of Bell clients who did not have any service at all – not even the time display.

Clement said he could not state how many Northwestel customers lost service. The company would not release that information in any case because it's private business information, he added.

He also confirmed service at some banks was affected, but again could not say how many banks or which ones.

The data link for banks is provided on the same line that failed, Clement said.

Northwestel chartered an aircraft yesterday morning to fly its technical crew from Whitehorse to Watson Lake.

Although the company was predicting at mid-morning that service would be restored before or shortly after lunch, it was not up again until 4 p.m.

"We had some technical issues we had to get past so it took a little longer than expected,” Clement said.

Service provided by the data link at the TD-Canada Trust Bank in Whitehorse was out all day.

TD spokesman Jeff Meerman said bank staff implemented back-up procedures that are in place in case the computer system goes down.

Deposits were recorded the old-fashioned way.

Clients who needed to withdraw money could use an ATM at another bank and return with the receipt to be reimbursed for the transaction fee, he said from Toronto.

Some pre-arranged appointments with clients had to be cancelled at the last minute.

Meerman said any business that could be postponed was put off, but bank staff also have procedures in place to deal manually with urgent matters should the computers fail.

"We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience that the outage caused,” he said.

"And we hope we were able to help people who had urgent needs yesterday.”