EarthLink: Outage lingered for DSL customers
The ISP says it's still recovering from an interruption in service that left some of its broadband customers in the San Francisco Bay Area without a connection.
A company representative said the ISP originally underestimated the effects of a power outage at one of its facilities, which led to an interruption in service for dial-up and DSL (digital subscriber line) customers. As earlier reported, EarthLink claimed Wednesday that the situation had been completely remedied. But now, it says that it later realized that some 12,000 of its DSL users continued to be without service.
The company said the oversight was based on a secondary chain of events touched off by the power issue. EarthLink said that when the original power outage occurred, the incident caused problems with a number of its DSL routers that serve the Bay Area, causing more extensive interruptions for some customers. As a result of the issue, the DSL routers could not be reset as a group and were being brought back online manually, resulting in the extended delays.
The EarthLink representative apologized for the confusion, saying only that the company was not fully aware of the second problem when it reported the issue had been fixed.
It was originally believed that the hitch in service began sometime Tuesday evening and was remedied completely by 4:45 a.m. PST Wednesday. However, this proved to be true only for the company's dial-up customers. As of Thursday afternoon, an estimated 2,000 DSL customers were still without service, the representative said, adding that those parties were able to access dial-up accounts as a backup.
CNET News.com learned of the extended delay via a number of e-mails from EarthLink customers who were upset to see the company claiming the problems had been completely addressed.
Some Web users posted messages on the Broadband Reports Web site, with one EarthLink customer claiming that the company's customer service representatives said that a power cable owned by SBC Communications and Covad Communications was the original source of the problem. It is not unusual for competing ISPs to share some equipment at a so-called co-location facility.
CNET News.com's Karen Southwick contributed to this report.