Sprint Service Knocked Out

A cut fiber-optic cable knocked out Sprint Nextel Corp. service Monday for almost a third of the geographic United States, according to an alert issued to customers. All calls initiated west of the Rocky Mountains were affected.

After several hours, service began to be restored, the company said.

According to the memo received by eWEEK, a fiber cable was damaged in the line between Phoenix and Palm Springs, Calif., midday.

At the same time, Sprint performed emergency maintenance to its fiber network near Reno, Nev., which required the temporary routing of traffic through the Phoenix network.

These two actions resulted in a “dual” fiber cut for traffic passing to and from the western parts of the country.

Customers initiating calls west of the Rocky Mountains received busy signals or an automated message that all circuits were busy.

The outage affected Sprints wired and wireless customers, including long distance and local services.

An estimated time to repair was not available from company officials.

According to company officials, parts of the services began to be restored by 3 p.m. PST. A Sprint representative said the company apologizes to its customers for the inconvenience.

Editors Note: This story was updated to include information about the outage and Sprints efforts to restore service.

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