[3] Its communications services have included local and long-distance voice, broadband internet, Multiprotocol Label Switching, private line (including special access), Ethernet, hosting (including cloud hosting and managed hosting), data integration, video, network, public access, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), information technology, and other ancillary services.

Larger mergers at the beginning of the 21st century added internet service providing to Lumen's core business.

In 1946, Clarke McRae Williams received ownership of the family's telephone company as a wedding gift.

This acquisition added 1.9 million cell lines to Century's network and nearly doubled the size of the company.

In this time it paid down its long term debt to $2.7 billion and its net income fell to $337 million annually.

In 2007, "workforce reduction" resulted in 600 employees laid-off and received $336 million in Federal and State subsidy.

[19] Embarq was the former landline business of Sprint and served cities in 18 states, including Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio.

[23][24] On April 22, 2010, CenturyLink (at this point still legally known as CenturyTel, Inc.) announced it would acquire Qwest in a stock-for-stock transaction.

[30] The merger also made CenturyLink owner of one of the Former Regional Bell Operating Companies: the successor to US West, which had been purchased by Qwest in 2000.

[38] In November CenturyLink acquired Tier 3 a Seattle-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform, and provider of advanced cloud management.

[40] On December 8, 2014, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of DataGardens, Inc., a Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

[43] On October 31, 2016, CenturyLink announced its intent to acquire Level 3 Communications in a deal valued at around $25 billion.

[citation needed] On January 9, 2017, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of Edison, New Jersey–based SEAL Consulting, a SAP services provider.

[47] On September 10, 2019, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of Streamroot, a provider of technology to improve video and static content delivery within bandwidth constrained areas.

[50] On August 3, 2021, Lumen announced it would sell its incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) operations in 20 states to Apollo Global Management for $7.5 billion.

Landline sales continued to fall but Lumen focused on growing the profitable fiber services.

[56] The deal allows Lumen to continue serving multinational enterprise customers via Colt's infrastructure.

[63] CenturyLink offers voice products ranging from traditional landlines to unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services and was recognized in 2018 by Frost & Sullivan for "growth excellence in VoIP access and SIP trunking".

They now offer a flexible edge framework on which you can bring applications to boost performance, optimize websites and secure web assets (using external apps such as ThreatX, Perimeter X, etc.).

[67] CenturyLink Small Business provides products and services around Internet, Phone, TV, and Cloud Applications.

[69] CenturyLink Residential provides Internet (either DSL or Gigabit Fiber, depending on the package), voice, and TV, via partnership with DirecTV.

The service was first introduced to Omaha, Nebraska,[76] and next rolled out to Las Vegas, Nevada,[77] with plans for expansion to several other markets.

[80] On February 2, 2014, CenturyLink announced the availability of Gigabit fiber service to multi-tenant businesses in Salt Lake City and surrounding communities.

[83] Lumen maintains and operates dark fiber within the United States for the Department of Defense, contracting announcements indicate.

[85][86] Gigabit Fiber markets On May 2, 2017, CenturyLink, Inc. completed the previously announced sale of its data centers and colocation business to funds advised by BC Partners, in a consortium including Medina Capital Advisors and Longview Asset Management.

[113][114] In 2022, additional outages, in South Dakota, resulted in a criminal finding from the FCC: An investigation by the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau found that Lumen apparently willfully and repeatedly violated FCC rules by failing to notify public safety call centers in a timely manner of both 911 outages and by deploying a system that was insufficient to transmit all 911 calls reliably to public safety call centers in the second outage, creating a significant threat to the life and property of tens of thousands of people.

[113] In December 2018, CenturyLink faced criticism for requiring residential customers in Utah to, via DNS hijacking, view and acknowledge a notice advertising its security and parental control software, before they could connect to the internet again.

In addition to the payment, CenturyLink is required to reform billing practices and submit audits to the Minnesota Attorney General's office.

[118] On August 30, 2020, CenturyLink suffered a major technical outage due to misconfiguration in one of the company's data centers.

[121][122] Lumen Technologies was reported to have been affected by a 2024 attack from the Salt Typhoon advanced persistent threat linked to the Chinese government.