ATM network outage at AT&T

By Denise Pappalardo, Network World

AT&T ATM CUSTOMERS suffered Tuesday as the telecom giant's network went down.

According to an industry analyst, about 7 percent of AT&T's ATM switches failed Tuesday afternoon between the hours of 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.

The cause of the outage is still unknown.

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

AT&T did not immediately return Network World's call regarding the outage.

As AT&T was working on the network, it seems the company did not notify all customers that the problem was fixed late Tuesday afternoon.

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

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/02/21/010221hnattatm.xml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 21, 2001