SAN FRANCISCO -- A glitch in Pacific Bell's telecommunications system brought down ATMs and Internet access across California and parts of Nevada on May 25, according to a report in the Contra Costa Times.
The outage affected frame relay networks, causing 22,000 circuits to go down at 8 a.m., according to Pacific Bell spokesman John Britton. He would not say what percentage of total circuits were affected or how many businesses or consumers were impacted.
The downed connections link debit card machines at stores, ATM machines at banks and Internet service providers that use Pacific Bell's lines. The glitch also blocked 911 dispatchers from seeing the locations of some callers. It did not bring down telephone connections.
Pacific Bell had retail and bank connections in the Bay Area working again by afternoon and had restored all but 6,000 of the connections by 5 p.m.
The cause of the outage was not immediately known.
Pacific Bell's territory covers 78 percent of California.
