Power outage suspends AOL services

America Online suffered a brief lapse in parts of its service Thursday because of a power failure that affected parts of northern Virginia, where the AOL Time Warner division is based. Services that were affected include Web access, chat rooms, search and keyword finders. An AOL representative said reports of instant messaging outages were still being investigated and that full service has been restored. Thursday's outage comes two days after an equipment glitch temporarily shut down AOL Instant Messenger.