Thousands of phone customers in the Northeast couldn't make calls or get on the Internet for a time on Thursday when a main cable owned by MCI was accidently cut, the Associated Press reported. The fiber-optic cable, access to which is leased to phone and Internet service providers in the region, was accidently cut at about 11 am EST, causing scattered outages in New England and New York state. MCI immediately rerouted its own calls, but its customer telcos had to scramble to find alternate routes, the report said.
Many customers received busy signals as other networks were filled with extra traffic. A representative for Southern New England Telecommuncations said its problems lasted until late afternoon. Also among the affected MCI clients was long distance and Internet service provider WorldCom. It said its customers experienced two hours of Internet and phone service problems. New York and New England customers of Bell Atlantic also fell victim to the cable-cut.
A simultaneous incident in Florida caused phone outages for 70,000 customers in that state. The problem there was caused by technician error as a crew working at a switching center west of Miami mistakenly shut the center down.
