DSL Outage Hits Some AT&T Customers

Mon Dec 3, 2007 11:05 PM EST

technology, att, outage, southeast-united-states

SAN ANTONIO — AT&T Inc. customers in the Southeast United States were unable to connect to the Internet through their DSL service for several hours Monday night because of an equipment problem, a company spokesman said.

Michael Coe, a spokesman for the San Antonio-based telecommunications company, said the digital subscriber line service was restored about 10 p.m. CST. He said the outage affected customers in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.

"The root cause of the disruption is still being investigated but appears to be an equipment impairment," Coe said in a statement.

Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime, said broadband outages are not unusual.

"Broadband goes down much more often than telephone lines because they didn't build the system for the same level of reliability," Burstein said. "We do not know how often it happens, however, because they're not obligated to report it."

At the Internet forum DSLreports.com, people in several of the affected states posted reports of problems Monday night. Many said it appeared to be an issue with AT&T's domain name servers, which help direct Internet traffic to its destinations.

Every computer connected to the Internet is identified by a series of four numbers known as an Internet Protocol address, such as "165.1.59.220." Domain names allow Internet users to type in something like "ap.org" instead of the string of numbers to navigate to a Web site or send an e-mail. Domain name servers match the name to the equivalent numeric address.

Several users at DSLreports.com said they were able to access the Internet during the outage by changing settings so that their computers would use alternate domain name servers.

Burstein said an entire territory can be affected by a single point of failure, such as a disrupted domain name server, when the network doesn't have a backup for the server.

___

On the Net:

AT&T Inc.: http://www.att.com

DSL Prime: http://www.dslprime.com

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Public Discussion (6)

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{"commentId":1242000,"authorDomain":"divbyzero"}

Division by Zero

The problem started affecting us at work then I noticed that my home connection was equally flaky. I could only load about 1 in 10 of the websites I tried to reach and hitting Refresh did no good. As soon as I could, I got to the OpenDNS website and reconfigured my router to use their DNS. After that, I had no problems. All in all it took me about 45 minutes after getting home to make the switch and I don't think I'll be going back to AT&T for DNS anymore.

{"commentId":1242000,"threadId":"185040","contentId":"1139661","authorDomain":"divbyzero"}

2 votes

#1 - Tue Dec 4, 2007 7:11 PM EST

{"commentId":1242047,"authorDomain":"bigmomma"}

rottlady

I'm curious, how did you know what the problem was? If my service wasn't working I would have on idea what to do....I'm bookmarking this just in case.

I have an ATT DSL, but not in the area of the problem thankfully.

{"commentId":1242047,"threadId":"185040","contentId":"1139661","authorDomain":"bigmomma"}

1 vote

#1.1 - Tue Dec 4, 2007 7:31 PM EST

{"commentId":1242083,"authorDomain":"divbyzero"}

Division by Zero

In my former life I was a computer tech. One could say that I'm now a recovering computer tech. As soon as I sat down at my computer after work and tried to hit a few websites I saw that I could get through to a few but not to most. I ran diagnostics on my router and it tested fine so I knew the problem was outside my home. The pattern of being able to hit some websites but not others continued so I opened a command prompt and tried to ping a few sites with the same result. I had a couple of IP addresses for a few sites (NYTimes & CNN) that I knew would not be down unless it's the Apocalypse so I pinged those IP addresses and got responses. At that point I knew there were either DNS issues or it was time to hospitalize the hamster, so I got over to the OpenDNS website, got the requisite IP addresses, and plugged those into my router configuration as my preferred DNS servers. After a restart of my router I could get through to any website I wanted. It didn't definitively tell me that AT&T's DNS was down, but when you hear hoofbeats in the night it's probably horses and not zebras.

{"commentId":1242083,"threadId":"185040","contentId":"1139661","authorDomain":"divbyzero"}

2 votes

#1.2 - Tue Dec 4, 2007 7:45 PM EST

{"commentId":1242127,"authorDomain":"bigmomma"}

rottlady

Thanks for explaination!

{"commentId":1242127,"threadId":"185040","contentId":"1139661","authorDomain":"bigmomma"}

1 vote

#1.3 - Tue Dec 4, 2007 8:02 PM EST

{"commentId":10404803,"authorDomain":"breelaboy"}

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{"commentId":10425317,"authorDomain":"brianalampton"}

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