Readers take notice: With one swing of a backhoe in Boston, Light Reading's Websites went dark for more than two hours on Friday afternoon.

We apologize for any inconvenience. The event also gives us all good reason to question whether Internet data services are yet carrier-class.

A large fiber cut is believed to have caused server connectivity trouble to our service provider New Agora Corp., which leases collocation space from Allegiance Telecom Inc.'s (Nasdaq: ALGX) Boston Data Center.

An Allegiance technical support representative acknowledged that there was an outage in Boston that is believed to have been caused by the cutting of two OC3 connections. "Apparently, it affected [WorldCom Inc. operating unit] MCI and several other carriers as well," he says.

The outage could have been a lot worse. Given that the links were only down for between one and two hours, the cuts were probably clean, with no shredding, which takes longer to repair, the support rep says. Fiber cuts can take several hours to fix, depending on how clean the cut is, where it's located, and whether there is enough slack in the line to bring the two cut ends of the fiber together.

— Phil Harvey, Senior Editor, Light Reading