THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 19, 1996 TAG: 9609190338
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 24 lines
MCI Communications Corp. said that some of its customers in Hampton Roads had their services disrupted for several hours Wednesday.
The Washington-based long-distance provider said the problem began about 11:30 a.m. and ended between 1:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. An undetermined number of customers in the region were affected, ``but it wasn't a tremendous number,'' said Jim Collins, an MCI spokesman.
MCI initially blamed local phone provider Bell Atlantic-Virginia for the problem. Later in the day, Collins said it was unclear which company was to blame.
``It was clearly not our fault,'' said Paul Miller, a Bell Atlantic spokesman.
MCI's Collins said the problem started with a ``glitch'' in the connection between MCI and Bell Atlantic in Norfolk, but he couldn't elaborate. Several local businesses, including some companies that provide access to the Internet computer network via MCI, said their service was disrupted by the outage. by CNB