A fire in a manhole in downtown Philadelphia last night damaged telecommunications transmission lines and knocked out service to 50 of AT&T's business customers, including Sovereign Bank, for 19 hours, spokesmen for the two companies confirmed.

Service was restored to most businesses by 3:15 p.m. Thursday, an AT&T spokesman said.

During the outage, Sovereign's Personal Online Banking, BillPay and its telephone banking service was unavailable, said Carl Brown, spokesman for Philadelphia-based Sovereign. In addition, some branch offices outside the Philadelphia area were affected, he said. Tellers in some branch offices were unable to provide customers with up-to-date account information, he said. ATMs, however, were available for all transactions.

All bank services have been restored, Brown said.

In a statement e-mailed to Computerworld, AT&T spokesman Jason Hillery said multiple AT&T fiber-optic network cables were damaged by a fire in manholes on Market Street about 8:15 p.m. Wednesday. The damage resulted in service disruptions for about 50 AT&T business customers, according to the statement. Later, in a telephone interview, Hillery declined to name the affected businesses.

AT&T said it worked with city and state officials and managers of the manhole system to secure access to the area to repair the network.

To restore service, AT&T mapped out alternate routes and rerouted network traffic.

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