Much of Verizon's long-distance telephone service in Florida turned off Thursday after a piece of network equipment broke down near Orlando.
The outage appeared to start about 1:30 p.m., said Verizon spokeswoman Bob Elek. By 5:37 p.m., the system was back to normal, Elek said.
The outage affected some data services that travel over long-distance lines, including some wide-area networks at companies. Depending on how calls were routed, customers trying to call to or from Tampa received error messages.
Verizon provides service to about a million access lines in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties and portions of Polk , Pasco, Manatee and Sarasota counties. The outage did not seem to discriminate between customers with Verizon's traditional copper phone line service or its fiber-optic connections.
Verizon does not provide long-distance service in eastern or southern parts of Florida, so those areas should not have been affected, Elek said. Also, local phone service did not appear to be affected, and Verizon's cellular service appeared to be OK as well.
The outage came a day after Verizon's cellular arm, Verizon Wireless, had a sporadic nationwide outage of 4G cellular data service.
Spokesman Chuck Hamby said that outage lasted much of Wednesday, and on Thursday, technicians were still trying to identify why it only affected some cities, some devices and some customers.
"It was just sporadic," Hamby said. "It affected Miami a bit, Tampa a bit, Chicago a little, and not all devices in all ways."
Such outages can bring some companies to a fast halt.
During the summer, Bright House Networks had an outage that affected much of its customer base in Florida.
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