outage

AT&T said Tuesday afternoon that an outage that left subscribers in Texas, Florida and several other states without U-verse TV or high-speed Internet service was caused by "an issue with a server that supports U-verse."

Netflix had to be happy to ring out the old year and ring in the new--especially after the way the old year ended. First the streaming service suffered a major malfunction on Christmas Eve; then its DVD website started acting up on New Year's Eve.

Many Netflix subscribers settling in to watch (or avoid watching) holiday movies on Monday evening received an unpleasant surprise in the form of an error message saying that the service couldn't be accessed.

Cox Communications said a failure of its email storage platform left subscribers on cable systems in the Midwest and on the East Coast unable to access its email service over the weekend.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA continued to make progress during the weekend to restore service disrupted by Hurricane Sandy last week, with the carriers reporting major progress in New York and New Jersey especially.

Wireless carriers continued to struggle as of Thursday to fully resolve service outages on their networks as a result of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, yet they and the FCC reported progress in those efforts. Still, some questioned whether the continuing outages exposed problems with the carriers' backup plans for operating in natural disasters where power is knocked out for a significant period of time.