A partial outage affecting much of Nebraska left many Alltel cellular phone customers without service Friday night, a problem that could end up causing some customers marital distress.

Dale Ingram, a public relations officer for Alltel, said the outage was affecting “much of the state.”

“It is in a broader area in Nebraska,” he said. “We’re troubleshooting it as we speak.”

He said the problem started when a switch or switches — equipment that transfers calls when a customer dials a number — went down. Ingram said he expected the problem to be fixed by midnight Friday.

Ingram did not know when the outage began.

U.S. Cellular customer Julie Gans of Lincoln said she had received several phone calls that showed up on her caller ID as coming from her boyfriend’s Alltel cell phone.

But every time she answered, the person on the line turned out to be a stranger.

She said several of her friends, who also have Alltel cell phones, told her of similar problems and of receiving calls from what appeared to be their spouses’ phones but turned out to be from strangers.

Some of those friends told her they were concerned their spouses had given their phones to someone else to use.

“Everybody thinks their wives are at home cheating on them,” she said.

The outage also caused problems for law enforcement Friday night.

Sgt. Tom Trotter of the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said he struggled to reach an accident reconstruction team to attend to a fatal crash on U.S. 77 near Princeton because he also uses an Alltel cell phone.

“We’ve been used to carrying (cell phones),” he said of the sheriff’s office, which uses Alltel cellular phones. “Now you feel crippled when you don’t have one.”

Reach Kevin Abourezk at 473-7225 or kabourezk@journalstar.com.