PacBell Outage Leaves Users Fuming
Tens of thousands of California businesses and consumers still are weighing the effects of a major Pacific Bell network failure that cut off service to high-speed data customers statewide for up to five days.
The outage, which was not completely fixed until Wednesday, affected big communication lines that crisscross the state carrying data to and from such everyday devices as bank automated teller machines and credit card verification machines used by grocery stores and other retail stores.
The meltdown also rendered useless thousands of high-speed Internet connections that feed into PacBell’s disabled lines to reach the Web. Many of the customers use digital subscriber line service through PacBell or other Internet service providers that use PacBell lines.
In addition, for several hours on the first day, California 911 agencies could not automatically retrieve location information for incoming calls. Regular voice phone service was unaffected.
John Britton, a company spokesman, said that the problem affected 22,000 network circuits, but that the company had no idea how many users lost service.
Britton said the problem was PacBell’s fault, but he declined to elaborate on the cause.
PacBell, the state’s largest local phone company, acknowledged the outage May 25 and said most of the affected lines were restored that evening. However, many customers still were out of service--and furious--as late as Wednesday morning.
The biggest complaint was that PacBell employees repeatedly gave conflicting--and incorrect--information to customers about the cause and severity of the outage. Then, once it was over, some customers said the company refused to credit them for the days without service.
“It was a nightmare. . . . My clients were screaming at me and I was screaming at PacBell,” said Robert Barnabi, the DSL specialist at Hughes Electronic Commerce, an Internet service provider in Lancaster whose service was cut off to “hundreds” of its customers until Tuesday morning.
“First, we were told that it was a power outage because of rolling blackouts. Then it was a server problem. Three of us kept calling, and all of us together had seven different stories between Friday afternoon and Monday morning,” Barnabi said.
Michael Shames, executive director of a San Diego consumer group and a frequent PacBell critic, said two PacBell representatives refused to credit his account for the five days he was without service.
“They said that they got a company e-mail that said this outage was outside of PacBell’s control and therefore no refunds,” Shames said. “Another service rep said this outage is very widespread, and if we had to give credits to all of our customers it would bankrupt the company.”
Britton said that shouldn’t be happening. “We have told people to credit on this one,” he said.
“It did not affect every single customer, but the affected customers could have been anywhere from Sacramento to San Diego to Reno,” he said. “Clearly, it was a significant situation.”
