Reason for outage is unknown

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

Story last updated at 6:53 p.m. on Monday, January 24, 2000

Outage puts brakes on MediaOne's Roadrunner By Simon Barker-Benfield

Times-Union business writer

A high capacity fiber-optic data transmission line in Georgia was knocked out of service yesterday morning, slowing MediaOne's Roadrunner high-speed Internet data service in Jacksonville and elsewhere to a crawl for most of the day.

The outage affected parts of Florida and Georgia and frustrated MediaOne's efforts to restore service by rerouting customer traffic, said Ann Murphy, a MediaOne spokeswoman.

Traffic was rerouted, but the equipment was swamped by traffic from the other locations, Murphy said. ''The other areas affected caused extreme congestion, causing slow - extremely slow - access to the Internet,'' Murphy said.

Murphy said the outage occurred about 6 a.m. near Stone Mountain, Ga., and was fixed by 4 p.m. What exactly caused the outage was unclear, Murphy said. An MCI WorldCom spokeswoman who handles outage queries could not be reached.

However, a weekend storm that spread snow, ice and rain and cut off electricity across much of the Southeast may have played a role.

About 100,000 electric customers - most of them in the Atlanta area - remained without electricity yesterday afternoon. An additional 25,000 customers of electric co-ops also were without service.

Efforts to restore power were hampered by fallen trees and limbs blocking streets.

Link to story:

http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/012500/bus_1f1Media.html

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), January 25, 2000