A piece of hardware in Bothell, Wash., caused Cingular Wireless’ massive service outage across most of Texas Wednesday, a company spokesman said.
Cingular customers were unable to make or receive calls from their cellphones for about 4 1/2 hours Wednesday. The cause was a problem with a signaling system in a facility in Bothell, a hub for Cingular in the northwest.
Network equipment at one of the company’s Bothell facilities processes calls for Cingular’s network across most of Texas, said Cingular spokesman Frank Merriman.
Technicians isolated the problem to a computer card that was not working properly, Merriman said.
“It was a hardware problem. Basically, what we had to do is replace a card and reboot the system and when we rebooted, the whole thing came back up,” Merriman said.
The problem started around 2:30 p.m. Service in different parts of the state began intermittently going out at first and then went out entirely for most of the state, Merriman said.
The problem affected about three out of every four Cingular Wireless customers in Texas, Merriman said. It appeared to hit all of the state’s major cities, he said.
Service was fully restored by 7 p.m., although some areas saw service return earlier, said Cingular spokesman Frank Merriman. Service in South Texas was restored before North Texas, he said. Some local Cingular customers said their phones began working shortly after 6 p.m.
Merriman said the card is being analyzed to see what went wrong.
“To the best of my knoweldge we have never had a situation like this before,” he said. “We’re doing everything possible to make sure it never happens again.”
Customers were still able to send and receive text messages because the problem didn’t affect data services, the company said. But at least two local customers said their data services didn’t work during the service outage.
Cingular customer Mark Halsell, 22, of Fort Worth, spent a frustrating Wednesday afternoon trying to call his mother, who is in Dubai, on her cellphone. When the Texas Wesleyan student couldn’t get through, he assumed the problem was with his mother’s cellphone network, because he couldn’t recall a time when his own service had been down for so long.
“Verizon doesn’t have these problems, do they?” said Halsell.
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