The small-town was without mobile coverage for nearly three days after an unfortunate lightning strike caused “serious damage” to the Manilla mobile tower on Tuesday.

While the most recent outage was out of anyone’s control, locals are at their wit’s end with up to six or seven mobile outages throughout the year.

This week’s dropout left the town’s shops and businesses without mobile coverage and internet access, meaning EFTPOS sales were out of the question.

Transwest Fuels owner Ben Clifton eventually reconnected his shop’s EFTPOS system, bypassing the Telstra line.

Mr Clifton said “sales went through the roof” when he got EFTPOS back.

“Now it’s about 70/30 in favour of EFTPOS sales, we’re fairly cashless now,” Mr Clifton said.

The business-owner said “there was a revenue drop” during the outage, but he also was concerned with the lack of communication from Telstra on the blackout.

“What I’ve found is Manilla is pretty savvy with social media,” he said.

“The best thing they could do would be to share it with a Manilla Facebook group.”

Robyn Fletcher from Tamworth Regional Council’s Manilla office said the outage had caused a few setbacks through the week.

“We have no mobile service and we have a a lot of staff in the field,” Ms Fletcher said.

“We can’t contact them and they can’t contact the office.

“I’m concerned emergency services won’t be able to respond.”

In relation to Manilla’s most recent mobile malaise, Ms Fletcher said “a little bit of communication wouldn’t go astray”. Telstra was able to restore service on Thursday afternoon.

Area general manager Mike Marom issued an apology to the community for the latest outage.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this caused. Our crews have worked to make the repairs as quickly as possible and services have now been restored,” Mr Marom said. Manilla residents were left without mobile coverage for almost two weeks in October as Telstra performed maintenance on the town’s phone tower.