AT&T customers’ Internet service disrupted
Around 7,500 AT&T customers in northern Atlanta were without Internet service for several hours Thursday after the company said it experienced a router problem.
Spokesman Lance Skelly said it would take a few days to complete an assessment of the problem, but it appeared it was caused by a defective card in a router. Skelly said only Internet service was affected and not mobile phone service.
“The situation was investigated and repaired as quickly as possible, and services have now been restored completely,” Skelly said Thursday afternoon.
The problem, however, caused headaches for many corporate customers who purchase Ethernet services wholesale or retail from AT&T to provide Internet, voice and video broadcast services to their own clients, according to Kraig Beahn, chief executive officer of L2Networks.
Beahn said L2Networks’ Ethernet service was disrupted from just after noon until around 3:40 p.m. “We had at least several hundred locations that we service in the Atlanta area that were either directly or indirectly affected,” Beahn said.
He said the outage also affected other carriers’ ability to provide similar services, including Qwest, CenturyLink, Deltacom, Earthlink and a number of smaller telecommunication providers.
Beahn said his company was “still not clear what took place. We’re still digging for information,” he said.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this situation caused for some of our customers,” said Skelly, the AT&T spokesman.
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69 comments Add your comment
RGB
September 21st, 2012
9:42 am
Having read the occasional blogs on AT&T, one constant is the poor opinion of their service reps–which I generally share. The company does a poor job in both selecting and training people. One the wireless side, AT&T always ranks dead last in customer service, so the management of the company apparently isn’t disturbed by their repeated poor showings. Monopoly is in their DNA and they do not view customer service as a differentiator. But #1 Verizon does.
I’ve dropped most AT&T services because of poor customer service and can’t envision an opportunity where I’d consider returning to them. Their Uverse mailings to me are simply expenses on their part that they’ll continue to pay for no reason. Seems the company will do anything to get customers to come back to them EXCEPT fix their glaring customer service issues.
On a contrary and rare note, I did contact an AT&T service rep a few days ago, was treated nicely, and she fixed my problem within 90 seconds. She possessed a slight Southern accent which, in my opinion, made all the difference! My thanks to her.
Becky
September 21st, 2012
9:45 am
7500 customers? Really? I heard from folks all over Gwinnett county and my company had no phone or internet for over 3 hours yesterday. They had outages as far north as Cumming. I suspect the number of folks that experienced this snafu was more like 75,000!
Inever
September 21st, 2012
9:46 am
have problems with AT&T internet service in Norcross,Never have problems with t-mobile cell service or my cable TV. I must be really living right?
Angie
September 21st, 2012
9:57 am
I think if you haven’t had problems with AT&T, you should count youself in the fortunate minority. There is a reason Clark Howard refers to them as “AT&T Customer no-service.” The other telecoms aren’t much better but I know I’ve never had rudeness or billing issues like my sister is experiencing with AT&T when I’ve dealth with Verizon, Comcast, Charter, or Dish Network.
Angie
September 21st, 2012
9:57 am
**Should be dealt not dealth.
gj2001
September 21st, 2012
10:02 am
Wah, Wah, Wah. The carriers and ISP’s all have outages. They will continue to have outages.
I just switched from comcast hi-speed internet to at&t uverse. my neighbors just had a comcast outage while uverse remained up…. no doubt i will experience an outage with uverse… but until my rates with at&t approach the rates of comcast i will stay with at&t for the time being.
I have been working on a global mpls access support network for the past 10years… and yes we have outages too. it’s going to happen.
Get Over It
September 21st, 2012
10:08 am
Do you really think that AT&T is the only company that occasionally has an outage? Look around you, everything we use has something to do with technology. Maybe it was something internal that took a while to figure out. I DON’T think they are as good as Bellsouth was and they definitely don’t care as much about their customers or employees as Bellsouth did, but come on, get over it! Go for a walk, read a book, work on something else for a few hours…I did!! In the big scheme of things…is the internet going out for a few hours really something to compain about?? Sure, it was inconvenient for some of us but i know for a fact they they were working to fix the problem all day! Get over it!!
Mark
September 21st, 2012
10:17 am
I’ve had ATT DSL for several years now and have never had a problem.
MelR
September 21st, 2012
10:47 am
used att dsl for 1 year–terrible service, slow, frequent outages in cobb county—switched to comcast—more expensive, but much faster and no outages yet. ATT–very poorly run company.
AtlJack
September 21st, 2012
10:55 am
my service went out and AT&T tech support said it was NOT a network problem but my Uverse box.
Hmmmm
travis
September 21st, 2012
11:13 am
My Cat’s Breath Smells like Cat Food!
witherig
September 21st, 2012
11:43 am
the financial institutions were down also so for all of you that tried to go into your account and see or transfer balances could not…. boy did we here about it and it was not our fault……
HAD VIRUS FOR 8 MONTHS THIS YEAR
September 21st, 2012
12:34 pm
My only problem besides talking to 100 people before finding the right one is the deception of paying monthly for tech support for your DSL internet & finding out if the problem can’t be fixed over the phone you will AGAIN have to pay to have a tech to come to your house. That should be included with the monthly fee that you have to pay. My computer has a virus that my son was on the phone with AT & T Tech support for 4 hours & still couldn’t get it off, but thankfully I have found that not every computer geek works for AT & T. There are those that are quicker & cheaper & their work is just as good if not better.
Zewt
September 21st, 2012
12:40 pm
Yeah, AT&T is horrible. My DSL was out for a week and they never fixed the problem then wanted to transfer me 8x to India. I said to hell with them. I have Charter now, so much better.
Ron
September 21st, 2012
12:51 pm
I ditched ATT for Comcast internet over a year ago. I average 36MBps down and 6 up, service is rock solid. Happily a non-ATT customer for life.
Jeffrey
September 21st, 2012
1:55 pm
My friend was choking on food yesterday and I needed the Internet to Google the Heimlich Maneuver so I could save his life. But my Internet service was with AT&T, which at the time was down. I could not get the information I needed, so my friend died.
Thanks a lot AT&T.
RGB
September 21st, 2012
3:53 pm
?
jerome K
September 21st, 2012
8:15 pm
how does att DsL stay in business? It’s slow and their “service” is terrible. Cable — 100 times better for the same money. Hello????
Rob
September 22nd, 2012
11:35 pm
Comcast is solid. Had AT&T at my business and home before changing. Tech support at ATT is a nightmare. I’ve had no reason to call Comcast.