ATM network outage at AT&T

AT&T ATM customers were suffering yesterday as the telecom giant's network went down.

An undetermined technical glitch caused 6% of AT&T's core ATM switches to fail yesterday afternoon, according to a company spokeswoman. The outage occurred between 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.

While it's not clear how many AT&T customers were affected, 5% of all permanent virtual circuits (PVC) on the carrier's ATM network were malfunctioning. The company says the network failure stemmed from erroneous "network control messages."

According to one user who asked to remain anonymous, the network failure was significant. "The network was hosed," she says. The company was forced to shut down all of its ATM interfaces because of problems sending Open Shortest Path First traffic over ATM.

It seems the company did not notify all customers that the problem was fixed late yesterday afternoon.

"Our company [network operations center] did not receive the AT&T all-clear call until 6:30 a.m. this morning," one customer says. "It was likely that the network was restored earlier, but from a customer standpoint, we were not back on their network until this morning."

AT&T says that for the most part the problem was solved fairly quickly, but the network is not completely stable. "There is occasional stuttering from one or two switches," the spokeswoman says. "Until the cause is known down to the last byte, (the technical staff) will not be satisfied that they have the problem totally solved."

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