AT&T; Internet Outage Cuts Off Thousands of West Coast Firms

An unusually widespread and lengthy outage of high-speed Internet service knocked as many as 14,000 West Coast companies off the Web and off e-mail Thursday and Friday.

Subscribers to a business DSL plan offered by AT&T; in California and at least four other states were affected, beginning at about 6 a.m. Thursday, said AT&T; spokesman Andrew Backover.

By the end of Thursday, about half of the subscribers were back online, with everyone reconnected by late Friday afternoon. One DSL line can provide Internet access to more than 20 personal computers.

“This is obviously something that has inconvenienced our customers, but we’re a company with millions of customers,” Backover said. “We pretty much pride ourselves on reliability.”

The technology manager of a 15-employee financial services firm in West Los Angeles said the outage was more than a minor inconvenience.

“Normally, when these types of things go down, it’s maybe an hour or two,” said Joseph Gruenling. “We lost tens of thousands of dollars, easily.”

Phil Harvey, a telecommunications analyst with LightReading.com, said such prolonged problems were rare.

“DSL isn’t an experimental technology any more, and when you’re offering DSL to business customers, you’re held to a higher standard,” Harvey said.