Cingular March Service Outage

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Cingular had a brief service outage earlier this week, due to problems with a database that stopped recognizing customers.

Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel declined to give specific numbers of customers affected, but said it was “a very small percentage of our customers, though you could’ve been anywhere around the country.”

Apparently a database that stores customer information and usually responds to signals from consumers’ phones by confirming that they are Cingular customers simply stopped responding, and affected subscribers received dead air or a fast busy signal when they attempted to make calls.

The problems began early Tuesday morning, between roughly 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. Eastern Time and were resolved by around 11 a.m. Anyone affected?