AT&T: Northeastern Outage Fixed

AT&T announced Wednesday that it had fixed a mobile data services outage that had primarily affected the Northeastern states of the U.S.

AT&T said that while the outage did affect data services such as Web surfing, other services such as voice calls and text messages were not affected.

"We identified it as a routing issue in the way data is routed to and from wireless devices," said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel in a statement to Reuters. Spiegel declined to provide more details about the cause of the problem which affected the company's fastest data network as well as its older slower data services, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, AT&T is also fixing its telecommunications network on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Gustav. AT&T is assessing storm-damaged areas and dispatching extra personnel to restore service in areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

"AT&T advises all wireless phone users in the affected areas to try text messaging when possible instead of making voice calls. During an emergency situation, text messages will often go through quicker than voice calls because they require less network resources," said AT&T in a statement on its Web site.

AT&T is also donating phones and Wi-Fi hot spots to assist evacuees, according to a statement by AT&T.