AT&T Outage cause last week.

Mon Apr 20 20:57:38 UTC 1998

According to AT&T, in a story just released, the problem was a Cisco
code problem. It would be interesting to hear what the actual software
cause was, if anyone from Cisco cares to let us know?.../rlj

- - - AT&T's network failure AT&T Corp. reported
 today that last week's frame relay network failure
 was due to a software-based problem. 

 Last Monday's network failure disrupted service
 nationally for thousands of AT&T's business
 customers for about a day. 

 The cause of the outage was previously attributed
 to the interaction between two frame-relay
 switches, but AT&T now says it was a software
 problem. AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong
 said today the company is working closely with
 Cisco Systems, which provided its switches, on
 ways to fix the problem. 

 The type of network application affected by
 frame-relay service is "any kind of high-speed data
 applications where large amounts of information
 [are] exchanged in quick bursts," Granieri said.
 Querying an inventory database is one example of
 such an application, he said. Reuters contributed
 to this report