Level 3 acknowledges network outage

Level 3 outage frustrating voice customers across United States

Social networks exploded Tuesday morning with customer inquiries and complaints because of a Level 3 Communications network outage across the United States.

Though by noon, reports had started spilling out that service was returning in certain spots.

It appears the outage started around 11AM EST, and according to the outage tracker Downdetector, hot spots on a heat map appear particularly colorful up and down the east coast and in California. Reports also surfaced of outages at Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and other service providers, possibly because of their use of Level 3 infrastructure.

Broomfield, Colo-based Level 3, which last month cut about 70 jobs across the country (not one of its bigger layoffs), has acknowledged the outage on its social media channels, including Twitter and Facebook.

Even the company's website was having some issues Tuesday morning.

Nothing doing at Level 3's website on Tuesday AM

(Hat tip to colleague Jon Gold for sniffing out word of this outage on Reddit Tuesday AM.)
UPDATE: Level 3 did post on Facebook at about 12:30pm EST that it had restored services:

On October 4, our voice network experienced service disruptions that affected some of our customers in North America. We know how important these services are to our customers. We were able to restore all services by 9:31 a.m. Mountain time. We are investigating the root cause of the outage.

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T-Mobile CEO John Legere was among those relieved with the outage's end, as he tweeted out: "Calling issues have been resolved by the provider, Level3 & is back to normal. Thanks for your patience."

Social media sites, including Reddit, have been filling up this morning with questions and comments about the outage, as well as notifications by organizations to their patrons as to why their voice communications are out.

Many expressed frustration over a lack of communication, while some chided Level 3 for not having such a redundant architecture after all, if speculation of a fiber cut was accurate. Level 3 has a growing enterprise services business.

This story, "Level 3 acknowledges network outage" was originally published by Network World.

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Bob Brown is the former news editor for Network World.