Phone outage, forwarding feature not working?

I have three business accounts that have been without service most of the day.  All three are set up with a forwarding feature in the case of an outage, and call should be going to cell phones.  They are not.  You people owe me for lost revenue and lost productivity.  Can you explain why the forwarding feature isn't working?  How can your phone network go down across the country and you not have back-up systems in place to handle a disaster like this?  Our back-up was forwarding to a cell phone, but you apparently didn't set that up on a different system?????