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Nine-hour network outage cripples AT&T mobile data traffic

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

February 1, 2008, 1:12 PM

Beginning at around 5:30 EST on Thursday, AT&T's EDGE and UMTS data networks went down for reasons even now unknown to company technicians.

AT&T has not reported what the cause of the outage was, or even how many customers were affected. Message boards tracking user complaints counted 18 states among those suffering from lost 2.5/3G connectivity. These states were: Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Indiana, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nevada, New York, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

Blackberry users yesterday were greeted with "data connection refused" messages, and iPhone users saw the "Could not activate EDGE" alert. Voice traffic, however was reportedly not affected.

This week has seen tremendous disruptions in communication due to the severance of important data lines, and international commerce will no doubt reveal the consequences for weeks to come.

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By foxfyre

edited Feb 4, 2008 - 7:11 AM

How can they tell?

Many of us still can't make calls from inside houses in much of the DFW Metroplex!

And to think that Cingular's customer sat was so poor that they felt that by buying the AT&T trademark - a corporation that in a period of 10 years went from the world's most recognized trademark to a failed enterprise - was an improvement!

I wish I could feign surprise.

Score: 0

By matthewsoft

edited Feb 3, 2008 - 10:35 AM

My service actually stopped earlier in Illinois about 7 pm Wednesday, but resumed around 10-11 pm [I know, because I was on the train and it worked up until I got off].