AT&T's Metro Ethernet services in Atlanta affected by outage

Some of AT&T's (NYSE: T) large business customers who take its Metro Ethernet service in the Atlanta area experienced a service outage Thursday due to a router issue, the carrier said.

"(It) is a situation affecting a small portion of customers in Atlanta involving a defective card in one of our routers, and is in the process of being repaired," Lance Skelly, director of media relations for AT&T, said in an email to FierceTelecom on Thursday.

While AT&T appeared to downplay the situation, some of AT&T's business customers took to Twitter to inform customers of the outage. Morehouse College and Kennesaw State University both reported network outages Thursday afternoon.

"The current network outage is an issue on AT&T side... IT has contacted AT&T and a ticket has been generated," Morehouse College tweeted to followers.

"KSU Residents we are aware of the Internet outage," tweeted Caleb Lee of Kennesaw State University. "AT&T is blacked out right now."

The initial tip about a service outage came to FierceTelecom from an unexpected source: Kraig Beahn of L2Networks, who's currently somewhat infamous due to some pending legal issues in south Georgia.

"Through an open master ticket we were 'unofficially notified' that a core Cisco 7600 router failed in turn apparently causing the outage," Beahn wrote in an email to FierceTelecom. "We were also notified through the carrier/operator community shortly thereafter that AT&T is reporting the same information to other customers as well."

Beahn added, "L2Networks also maintains a multitude of 3rd party carriers that in turn use AT&T's wholesale metro-ethernet network as well. All of those services have been severed (at the exact same time)."

AT&T's southeast region has seen some interesting network issues this summer. Earlier this week, voice service to CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) customers in some Alabama towns was affected due to a technical glitch at AT&T, and a DDoS attack took down Internet service to a large part of the region in August.

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