AT&T says vandalism to blame for California service outage

AT&T says that the service outages that hit California today resulted from an apparent act of vandalism.

AT&T first reported the outage at about 10 a.m. EDT. At the time, the company said that the outage was affecting both wireless and wireline services in some areas of California and that it was caused by an unspecified number of fiber optic cable cuts in the San Jose area.

At 2 p.m., the company sent out an update saying that it was working to repair the cables and that it was working to reroute traffic to other network connections wherever possible. The company also said that it was “working closely with law enforcement officials on this act of vandalism.”

As of this writing, AT&T has not fully restored service to the affected California areas and has not disclosed any further information about whatever apparent vandalism caused the cable cuts.

The outage in California marks the first major outage for AT&T since last December, when a snowstorm knocked services offline through the Midwestern United States. The company also suffered an outage to its 3G and EDGE networks in the Northeastern United States last September.