San Francisco hit by AT&T service dropout

by Stevie Smith - Dec 14 2009, 07:00

If you believe the near-constant waves of discontent apparently directed at AT&T, then there’s really not much customer love left to lose for the leading American telecommunications titan.

However, any lingering affection for AT&T may have been further sullied by the poison of disgruntlement this past Friday when the company’s mobile service was hamstrung by an abrupt outage in the San Francisco area of California.

The problem, which prevented users from accessing the Internet or viewing their e-mail accounts, resulted in many AT&T customers being met with little more than cursory error explanations such as ‘Cannot get mail’ and ‘Could not activate cellular data network.’

Although insisting that AT&T’s GSM and EDGE mobile services were unaffected by the issue, company spokesman John Britton told local publication The San Francisco Chronicle that the company was “seeing a hardware issue” in the downtown area that it believed was caused by “some degradation in service.”

Initial reports of service dropout began surfacing on micro-blogging site Twitter during the early part of Friday afternoon, with AT&T users revealing their handsets were carrying a fully functioning voice service, plenty of signal strength, but absolutely no online connectivity.

The problem, which was likely connected to AT&T’s 3G server platform, lasted into the early evening for those local to the San Francisco area, although some customers situated further from downtown were told they might not be back online until some time on Monday.

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