Qwest business customers lose service
by Martin Moylan, Minnesota Public RadioSt. Paul, Minn. — Qwest says a significant, but as-yet undetermined number of its business customers lost Internet service for about an hour this morning.
Qwest spokeswoman Joanna Hjelmeland says the company is still trying to figure out how the outage occurred and how widespread it was.
"It's hard to quantify. We're still looking into what exactly caused it. But it did affect some business customers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Also it may have potentially impacted a few residential customers," said Hjelmeland.
Hjelmeland said the Internet outage happened between 10:40 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Wednesday.
The disruption involved subscribers to what Qwest calls its optical ethernet product. It provides very high capacity and high speed connection to the Internet. It supports transmission speeds up to one gigabit per second.
