Subscribers to AT&T Corp.'s DSL Internet service in five Western states lost their connections for several hours Thursday after the telecommunications company experienced a problem with equipment that routes data over its network.
The service went down about 6 a.m. PDT, and about 50 percent of customers were restored by Thursday evening, said AT&T spokesman Andy Backover.
The company confirmed homes and businesses in California and four other Western states were affected, but it would not provide the total number of subscribers who lost service or name the other states. Backover said AT&T received more than 2,000 reports of trouble.
"We're working as hard as we can to restore the service," he said. "We're very apologetic to any customers who were inconvenienced."
Backover added the problem stemmed from a problematic router that's been identified and was being repaired. But he did not know when all affected customers would be restored.
The outage affected only customers of digital subscriber line, or DSL, service, and not other portions of the network for T1 service and other Internet backbone functions that AT&T maintains.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
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