Thousands Affected : Switch Fails, Disconnects Long-Distance Customers
AT&T; closed at $36 Wednesday, up a quarter of a point on the New York exchange. But some San Fernando Valley brokerage houses weren’t putting much stock in the giant telephone company at the end of their business day.
They were among thousands of AT&T; customers from West Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo who lost their long-distance service for nearly four hours Wednesday because of a broken switch at a Sherman Oaks phone center.
“We were out of business,” moaned Wade Ambrose, a broker with Jones & Associates in Westlake Village. “It’s caused a hell of a problem because we do everything by phone.”
The outage occurred at the height of the normal stock trading hours on East Coast exchanges, which are open from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific time.
The 8:06 a.m. equipment failure interrupted service to about 16% of AT&T; long-distance customers in the 818, 805 and portions of the 213 area codes, said Kelly Williams, a spokeswoman for AT&T.;
Besides the San Fernando Valley, affected areas included a portion of the Westside, the San Gabriel Valley, the Santa Clarita Valley and Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, she said.
Williams declined to reveal the number of customers affected “for proprietary reasons. . . . Our competition would love to learn those numbers.” But she said the damaged switch can handle 309,000 calls an hour.
Calls Rerouted
She said service was restored by 11:54 a.m. by computerized equipment that rerouted calls to other circuits. She said most customers could have placed calls by repeatedly dialing a number.
But some AT&T; users complained that they were completely without service for more than two hours during what is normally the busiest part of their business day.
“Our customers couldn’t reach us and we couldn’t reach them. This has cost us multiples of thousands of dollars,” Ambrose said.
Local phone service was unaffected by the switch failure, said Kate Flynn, a spokeswoman for Pacific Bell. Also unaffected were long-distance services offered by MCI and U.S. Sprint, two competitors to AT&T;, Pacific Bell officials said.
