Cingular Has Outage Days After Merger News

This probably isn’t what Cingular Wireless had in mind with its advertising boasts about “raising the bar”: Nearly 2 million Cingular customers were barred from using their cellphones Tuesday.

The database glitch that knocked out service came at an awkward time for Cingular -- just two days after its parent companies, AT&T; Inc. and BellSouth Corp., agreed to merge amid concerns that a consolidating telecommunications industry might be bad for service.

Cingular told callers that thousands of Southern Californians were affected.

Officially, though, the nation’s largest cellular company wouldn’t reveal the number. “We have more than 54 million customers, and this affected a very small minority,” spokesman Mark Siegel said.

The database is supposed to confirm that a user making or receiving a call is indeed a customer before letting the call go through. Siegel said the database stopped recognizing some customer accounts.

The outage lasted about six hours. The database was repaired by 9 a.m. Pacific time. But service remained spotty for some customers throughout the morning as Cingular’s network was flooded with pent-up calls.

“It was very much a small minority of customers involved, but if it happened to you, it happened to too many people,” Siegel said.