STOCKTON (CBS13) — Phone and email service at the San Joaquin County Courthouse was down on Thursday, leaving many wondering if they needed to appear in court.

A call to the courthouse phone number says the line is disconnected, as it had been all day.

John Van Dorst just wanted to pay a traffic ticket.

“The numbers on the ticket were disconnected, so we were looking online and all the numbers they have online are also disconnected,” he said.

He made the 20-mile drive from Ripon to pay it at the Stockton courthouse on his day off.

“We drove down only to find out my ticket still hasn’t been put in the system,” he said. “I would not be here if the phones worked.”

A spokesperson with the courthouse says it was having an external issue with AT&T. The court could access case files on its internal network, but phone calls and email weren’t coming through.

CBS13 attempted to call AT&T, but the company didn’t list a phone number for its public relations team. An email address listed for the company’s public relations ended up being the wrong one. It took contacting them through Twitter to finally get through.

AT&T’s public relations team says it didn’t know there was a problem in San Joaquin County, so the company is now looking into it.

Van Dorst hopes he can pay his ticket next week in Manteca, less than 10 miles away.

“Hopefully the phones are working in a week so I can call and see if the ticket’s put in,” he said.

AT&T released a statement saying the wireless and wireline outages were from a fiber line cut, but did not elaborate on where or when it happened. It suspects vandalism and both federal and local investigators are looking into what happened.