Cingular Wireless L.L.C.’s GSM network failed last weekend, affecting thousands of customers nationwide.
The outage affected Cingular’s GSM overlay network in the southern, northeastern and midwestern United States, preventing about 880,000, or 4 percent, of Cingular’s 22 million customers from using their mobile phones and accessing their voice mail. The company’s older GSM networks in California, Nevada, Washington, and North and South Carolina use different network infrastructure and were not affected.
The outage lasted from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. Cingular is investigating the possibility that the failure of a home location register in Atlanta, which houses subscriber information, led to the outage.
Customers affected by the outage are entitled to receive credits for the time without service and are advised to contact the carrier’s customer support team or a retail outlet.
