UPDATED: AT&T U-verse customers suffer outages in U.S. markets

AT&T (NYSE: T) U-verse customers in several U.S. markets have been suffering from unexplained outages since as early as Monday morning, according to comments in forums on DSL Reports and an article in the Miami Herald.

The outages in South Florida were confirmed to the Miami Herald by AT&T spokeswoman Kelly Lane Starling, who said the company had a "team of engineers and technicians... working to resolve the issue" and apologized for customers' inconvenience.

Outages in other parts of the country, however, accumulated on DSL Reports forums without any direct response from the company. Karl Bode wrote "users in Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Arkansas... have been unable to use U-Verse voice, television or Internet services--in some cases since yesterday [Monday] morning."

Mari Melguizo issued this AT&T statement about the U-verse outages to FierceIPTV: "A limited number of AT&T customers in some markets may be experiences issues with U-verse service. We have been working around the clock and are making progress on resolving the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers."

Neither Starling nor Melguizo gave any kind of indication as to what had caused the outages or when they were likely to be fixed.

AT&T is due to report its fourth quarter 2012 earnings on Thursday, Jan. 24. If it does not resolve these problems quickly and give a reason for the issues, it may have some additional explaining to do at that time.

UPDATE: An AT&T spokeswoman told FierceIPTV, "U-verse service has been restored for all customers affected by the outage. The software problem causing the issues was resolved by AT&T engineers early this morning. We are not pleased it took so long to fix the issue. AT&T will provide a credit to customers who were affected. We know our customers count on their U-verse service and we apologize for the inconvenience." The New York Times also reported that some AT&T U-verse customers were tweeting that they were back online Thursday morning.

For more:
- check out the New York Times blog post
- see the DSL Reports post
- read the Miami Herald article

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