AT&T suffers major outage
Eastern US disconnected
Thursday, 4 September 2008, 09:40
AT&T'S WIRELESS DATA network crashed yesterday in parts of the eastern US.
The telco titan confirmed that access was restored just before lunchtime but he did not know, or wasn't willing to reveal, the extent of the problem.
Various online forums moaned about outages in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois and Missouri which cut off Web surfing and e-mail.
Most of the people moaning were Iphone users many of whom were uncertain if it was yet another connection problem with their buggy phone.
Voice calls, text messaging and BlackBerry e-mail access still worked.
The problem was caused by faulty routers which have now been fixed. µ
L'Inq
AP
Share this:
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
INQ Whitepapers
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Jobs
Advertisement
INQ Poll
Not related to at&t directly, but living in chicago, i don't see how we are part of a eastcoast network. Chicago being pretty much directly in the middle of the country and the state directly east of us is Indiana which is still considered "Mid West" united states. In light of how horrible the 3G network coverage wouldn't it make more sense to have a "central us" network? Might be too logical for a telecom to understand that but even our goverment understands Illinois is in the "central standard" timezone. It just seem strange to only have eastcoast and westcoast when the entire country considers the middle the "midwest". That is just too big a area to be shuttered onto a easter network or western network. It is no wonder so many were affected by the outage if there are only so few routers setup by at&t problems like this are going to be widespread as people ramp up 3G use.
Sounds like someone sliced a few more fiber optic cables and screwed up badly.