Call your own number from another phone before you touch anything else. If you hear ringing on that call and nothing rings on your end, you have a business phone that is not ringing, and the cause depends almost entirely on what kind of phone it is. A cell phone fails for different reasons than a desk phone, and a desk phone on the internet fails for different reasons than one on a copper line.

Below is a decision tree by phone type, with a time for each step. Most problems end by the fifth or sixth minute. Ten minutes covers the unlucky ones, including the call to the carrier.

Step zero: confirm what the caller hears (2 minutes)

Use a cell phone on a different carrier if you can. Dial your business number and listen for what you get.

  • Normal ringing that goes on and on, then voicemail or nothing: the system thinks it is delivering the call. Your phone or the route to it is the problem. Keep reading.
  • A busy signal, a fast busy, or a recording that the number is not in service: this is the carrier or the number itself. Skip to the carrier section.
  • Ringing on one test phone but not another: the problem is between those two carriers. Tell your carrier both numbers.

Also check whether anyone can reach you by dialing the number from inside the office. Internal-only success means the lines into the building are the problem.

If it is a cell phone (3 minutes)

Go through these in order, because each takes seconds.

  1. The side switch or ringer mode. A silent switch is the most common reason a phone does not ring.
  2. Volume. Press the volume-up button while the phone is on the home screen and confirm the ringer volume.
  3. Focus or Do Not Disturb. A scheduled Focus that turns on at 5 p.m. will silence the line.
  4. Bluetooth. A phone connected to a headset in a bag, a car in the driveway, or a watch can ring there and not on the handset. Turn Bluetooth off and call again.
  5. The ringtone itself. A ringtone set to "None" on a contact, or silent for unknown callers, produces silence.

If it is a landline or a basic desk phone (4 minutes)

Start with the equipment, not the line. Check the handset cord and the line cord. Check the power adapter if the phone has a screen. Many desk phones have a ringer volume in a menu that is easy to set to zero by accident.

Then isolate. Unplug everything else on the line: the fax, the alarm panel, the credit card terminal, any splitters or filters. Wait 60 seconds. On a traditional copper line, plug a basic corded phone into the wall jack and call in. If that phone rings, the line is fine and your desk phone or something else on the line is the culprit. Reconnect devices one at a time and test after each one. If the basic phone does not ring, the problem is the line, and that is the carrier's to fix.

If it is a VoIP phone, app, or internet line (5 minutes)

An internet phone needs three things at once: internet, power and a live registration with the provider. When any one fails, callers still hear ringing because the provider tries to reach a device that is not there, and then rolls to voicemail.

  1. Is the internet up? Open any website on a computer in the office. (30 seconds)
  2. Restart the modem, router and the phone adapter or desk phone, in that order, waiting a minute between. (3 minutes)
  3. Look at the phone's screen or the provider's portal for registration status. Words like "Registering," "No service" or "Account error" mean it has not connected. (30 seconds)
  4. Think about what changed. A new router, a new internet plan, a moved desk, a changed firewall or a VPN can all break registration. (1 minute)
  5. Check the provider's status page for an outage. (30 seconds)

For a calling app, open the app, confirm it is logged in, and confirm notifications and battery settings let it run in the background. An app that was force-closed will not ring.

Marlow Tax & Bookkeeping, a four-person office in Dayton, ran into the router case. On Wednesday at 2 p.m. the internet provider swapped the router. The desk phones stopped registering, but callers still heard ringing. On Thursday at 10 a.m. a client emailed: "I called twice yesterday and it rang forever." The office manager, Wanda, plugged the phone adapter into the new router and restarted it, and the phones registered again in about two minutes. The phones were silent for 20 hours, but only about four of those were business hours. At 14 calls over an eight-hour day, which is 1.75 an hour, roughly seven calls went unanswered.

When it is the carrier: billing, ports and outages (2 minutes plus the call)

Three carrier causes are worth ruling out before you spend an hour on hardware. A past-due account can suspend a line. A number that is partway through a port may send calls somewhere you do not expect. And outages do happen. Call with these words:

Callers hear ringing when they dial my business number, 937-555-0123, but none of my phones ring. Please confirm the line is active and the account is in good standing, that calls are routed to the device or ring group I have registered, and that there is no port or service order open on the number. Then place a test call while I stay on the line and tell me what you see.

Ask for a ticket number, the name of the person you spoke with, and a time for the next update. If the answer is "nothing is wrong on our end," ask what routing the number currently points to, and read it back.

A stopgap forward while you fix it (3 minutes)

While the real fix is pending, send the line somewhere that answers. On a US landline, dial *72, then the cell number, and wait for the confirmation tone; *73 turns it off. On a VoIP service, use the portal's "forward all calls" setting. On a cell phone that is the problem, ask the carrier to forward the line to another phone. Then call the number from another phone and confirm that the forward works. Do not assume.

If nobody will be near the cell phone either, forward to something that answers on its own. Rocketship answers the number you already have through call forwarding, so a dead desk phone can point at it for the day; see forward your business number to AI. For forwarding on a phone, how to set up call forwarding on iPhone has the steps.

Keep a record so it does not repeat

Write down five things: the date and time you found it, the symptom, the cause, the fix, and how long it was down. Estimate how many calls you missed by multiplying your usual calls per hour by the hours down. After that, set one habit: every Monday at 9:00, call the business line from your cell and let it ring, which takes 30 seconds and catches the next failure before a client does. If your calls are routed in several places, phone system for small business and second phone number for business help you choose a setup with a backup. A weekend version of this problem is in Saturday morning nobody answers the phone. Two companion fixes: business phone goes straight to voicemail and voicemail box full.

Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number works on Launch, with call minutes bought as you go ($15 for 50), and a dedicated line is $5 a month.