What Does AT&T Mean By a “Brief” Outage?

12/30/10: We have U-verse, the whole package of land line, Internet, and TV. Around 6:00 PM, the Internet connection slowed down to the pace of sap in January. Around 6:30 or so, the phone line and Internet connections were dead. Scary not to have a phone line. Glad we have a mobile phone for such an event. Oh, the TV feed was working fine.

After an hour of being out, I called AT&T U-verse using my AT&T mobile phone. The first three times I called, the computer voice on the line told me the circuits were busy and try later. Then I got through and waded into the swamp of a computer voice asking me questions and telling me it couldn’t hear me. After about 5 minutes of this, I was put in line for “the next available service representative.” Close to a half-hour later, a nice young man answered. When I told him my area code and number, he said there was total outage in that area, that they knew about it, had no idea what had happened, had no idea how long it would take to get fixed.

We live in west St. Louis County. Through text-messaging to other U-verse customers, I found out that friends who live farther out than us also had no telephone or Internet. Friends who live in the City of St. Louis (about 25 miles to our east) were also out. There were also spotty DSL outages here and there in the area, or greatly slowed service.

After over two hours of dead lines, it all came alive again. I emailed KSDK-TV, the local NBC affiliate about this. Their response to me was as follows:

“Here is what AT&T Says happened...

“Due to an equipment issue, some customers in the St. Louis area may have experienced a brief disruption to their Internet, wireless and/or landline phone service this evening. Almost all service has been restored, and customers do not have to do anything to have their service return. It will happen automatically.

“We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused our customers.”

And there is almost no noise on the Internet or on the news services (local or national) about any outages at all. So, what is “brief?” Is over two hours brief? I guess brief is in the eyes of the giant corporation.