Phone Outage Hits Callers Nationwide

Scattered disruptions in telephone services nationwide caused several hours of turmoil Wednesday in hospitals, businesses and the world’s largest oil market.

The problems, which began shortly before 11 a.m. PST, were traced to a severed cable in Illinois owned by Olympia, Wash.- based Illuminet Inc., a privately held company that provides signaling and other services to phone company networks.

AT&T Corp., one of the carriers that uses Illuminet to handle calls, said service was disrupted for its long-distance and mobile-phone customers nationwide.

Outages also were reported by phone customers of Teleport Communications Group Inc., a regional supplier of local telephone service to mostly big businesses in 66 major cities. Also affected were mobilephone customers of Bell Atlantic Corp.

Phone service was restored to Teleport customers and Bell Atlantic customers by 1:30 p.m. PST and mostly restored for AT&T customers by early evening.

Phone problems in New York were being reported “all over the city,” said Sunny Mindel, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management.

AT&T, the nation’s top long-distance carrier, experienced problems “across the United States,” said spokesman David Johnson.

Among major customers reporting outages were the New York Mercantile Exchange, the world’s largest market for trading oil, and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center also in Manhattan. Traders, doctors and business executives were forced to rely on alternate means for making calls, such as mobile phones.

At the New York Mercantile Exchange, “People on the trading floor can’t make outgoing calls. If you get an order you can’t execute it,” said Bob Yawger, a broker at E.D. & F. Man International Futures Inc. in New York. He said there also were problems with incoming calls.

Trading at the Nymex was forced to close early because of the phone outage.