Qwest long distance goes down for some

Qwest Communications confirmed Thursday that the company experienced a long distance outage that lasted about two and a half hours.

The outage caused some of Qwest's customers to not be able to make and receive long distance phone calls. However, Qwest officials said that calls are now able to be completed.

The company was not able to provide details about what caused the outage nor was it able to provide details of how many customers were affected. But it's believed that the outage disrupted service in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and parts of North Carolina and Florida.

Qwest, which is headquartered in Denver, has one of the nation's largest long-haul fiber networks, which connects long distance calls to other carriers. The company sells its service and dark fiber (or optical fiber not in use) to other service providers, which then use the fiber or resell the service to their customers. The company also offers Internet and telephony services to large companies and government agencies.

A spokesman for the company said that Qwest's enterprise customers can request a "Reason for Outage" document once the root cause analysis of the outage is complete.

"We are also committed to doing all we can to provide excellent and consistently reliable service to our customers and know that they depend on our communications services," the company said in a statement.

Rumors surfaced earlier this year that Qwest was trying to sell its long-haul fiber network at a price tag of between $2 to $3 billion. Qwest was expected to use the proceeds to help pay down its $14 billion in debt. But potential buyers of the network, such as Cogent Communications, AT&T, and Verizon Communications, balked at the high price. And in June, Qwest said that after a "strategic review," it had decided to keep the network.