Service to customers of Pacific Bell Mobile Services wireless phone network was knocked out by a database problem that affected at least 90 percent of the provider's 420,000 customers throughout California and Nevada.
"We began experiencing problems Friday morning in our software," John Britton, a PacBell spokesman, said Monday. "It was not a problem with infrastructure. It was a software problem."
The company's entire digital PCS cellular network was affected by "corrupt data" in the customer database, Britton said, creating errors during a "reload" procedure performed by the software. The database was located in a network switching center.
The company was still unable to provide specifics of the problem, but it appears that when the database began to fail, customers calling in were not recognized as customers and calls were not completed.
The interruption began around 9 am on Friday, Britton said. For some customers, he said, service was almost completely inaccessible, while for others access was more intermittent.
By 2:30 pm on Friday, Britton said, service started coming back, and "we thought we'd taken care of it by 5 pm." But problems lingered for another 24 hours.
Customers would either get a recording indicating the service interruption or their phone would simply return the caller to its main "prompt," with no connection being made at all.
The company is currently working with its technology provider, Ericsson, to troubleshoot the problem and prevent its recurrence.
There is no reason to suspect internal or external sabotage as a cause of the problem, Britton said.
