Despite a spike in call volume, three of the largest U.S. service providers--AT&T (NYSE: T), Sprint (NYSE: S) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ)--did not see any major disruptions or damage to their respective wireless and wireline networks from yesterday's 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia.
"There has been high call volume," said Peter Thonis, a spokesman for New York-based Verizon to Bloomberg. "You have to call several times to get through some places. It's very temporal. I know of no network issues at this time."
Likewise, AT&T and Sprint did not report any damage to their wireline or wireless networks, although the service provider's spokesman said that they "are seeing heavy call volume."
In addition to seeing a spike in voice calling, consumers leveraged their wireless smartphones and computers to talk about the topic on the two dominant social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter. Twitter said that their users sent over 40,000 earthquake-related tweets at a rate of 5,500 tweets per second after news broke that the earthquake occured.
For more:
- Bloomberg has this article
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