AT&T's VoIP suffers outage

Oh no! A news story throwing doubt on the reliability of IP communications. AT&T U-verse had a phone service outage this week that hit customers all around the country.

Customers reported that they were not getting a dial-tone when they picked up the phone starting around 10:30 AM on Tuesday. AT&T reports that most customers saw their service return by 2:45 PM that day. One interesting sidenote is that people trying to contact some AT&T U-verse customers got messages saying that the numbers they were trying to reach had been disconnected! According to an Associated Press report, support personnel at AT&T were telling customers that it was a server crash that took out U-verse Voice in AT&T's entire 22-state local-phone service area.

AT&T has 1.15 million U-verse Voice customers, but the extent of how many customers were actually effected is still unreported. Other than a few more angry VoIP users, things seem to be back to normal now.

For more:
- read the AP story

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