Verizon Wireless confirms data outage

Computerworld - Verizon Wireless has confirmed that data service outages affected eastern U.S. customers for up to four hours early today.

The company blamed the outage, which affected some users between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. EST today, on defective software in one of its data centers.

In an e-mail, a Verizon Wireless spokesman said some users experienced outages, some were hit with service slowdowns and others were not affected at all.

"We found the problem in one of our centers, switched out the software and are now doing [a] root cause investigation," the spokesman said.

Verizon Wireless notified customers via Twitter at about 9:45 a.m. that the issue had been resolved by 8 a.m.

The spokesman did not say how many users were affected by the outage.

Verizon said that the problems did not affect its voice service.

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen, send e-mail to mhamblen@computerworld.com or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed .

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