BATON ROUGE — The Department of Children and Family Services announced Friday that their child abuse and neglect hotline is operational again after an outage earlier in the week caused by Hurricane Beryl.

Louisianans may return to reporting child abuse and neglect to the regular toll-free hotline number, 1-855-4LA-KIDS (1-855-452-5437), and the LAHelpU Customer Service line at 1-888-LA-HELP-U (1-888-524-3578), DCFS said.

DCFS said it will continue to monitor both the hotline and LAHelpU line throughout next week to ensure services remain stabilized.

The lines had been unable to receive calls from AT&T numbers earlier this week due to an apparent disconnect between local carriers and Lumen Technologies, a data center in Houston that had been knocked offline after the storm. Beryl affected other services that relied on AT&T including Ochsner and other emergency services.