Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research

News Analysis  

AT&T Faces Backlash Over U-verse Outage

January 22, 2013 | Ray Le Maistre |
AT&T Inc. is keeping schtum over what appears to be a major U-verse outage that began during the morning of Jan. 21 and which appears to have affected a substantial number of customers across the southern states of the U.S.

While the operator's website, blogs and Twitter feeds have no messages regarding any ongoing service problems -- the most recent tweet on AT&T's official @Uverse feed early Tuesday states "Today we honor Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dreams for equality. #MLK" while the @ATTCustomerCare feed has no mention of any disruption -- customers have been using their smartphones to criticize the company for its service failure and lack of information about the outage.

One customer, Tony Casas (‏@tonycasas), tweeted: "Wow…. On the Phone with #ATT #Uverse 'troubleshooting' for 52 minutes before they inform me that half the US is experiencing an outage," while many others complained of having no Web access or TV service during the Martin Luther King Day holiday.

One customer who tweeted using the #uverse hashtag noted that "theories abound about cause from DHCP servers down to hacking of system. Grrrr."

The AT&T U-verse page on Facebook was also swamped with messages from angry customers wanting to know why AT&T was providing no information about the outage.

Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Phil Harvey, another user who relies on the U-verse triple-play package for his communication and entertainment services, says he was "down all day" Monday, though that may have had something to do with his caffeine intake.

AT&T declined to pinpoint which service areas are affected by the outages or provide a reason for them, but the company released this statement Monday night: "A limited number of AT&T customers in some markets may be experiencing issues with U-verse service. A team of engineers and technicians are working to resolve the issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience to our customers."

If you are a U-verse customer and experienced service disruption, please comment on the message boards below, stating where you are located and when your services went down and, if restored, when you were reconnected.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Content
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Mach-Zender Modulator
A modulator that uses a phase shift to create 1s and 0s