ATT.net Suffers Outage

DALLAS (TheStreet -- AT&T's(T Quote) ATT.net Web site was hit with an outage early Monday, the same day that the telecom giant unveiled an ambitious new cloud service.

The ATT.net portal, which contains the company's Web mail offering, was inaccessible for a period on Monday morning. An AT&T spokesman blamed the outage on a 'fiber cut,' which is typically an accidental cut in an optical fiber link.

"Access to the att.net site has been restored," he said, in an email to TheStreet received shortly after 10 a.m. EST, explaining that the cut had "temporarily impacted" ATT.net access.

The spokesman added that the att.net outage had no impact on the company's cloud services. "It was an outage affecting one area, that particular att.net portal," he explained. "You'll note, for example, that our Web site, att.com, was up and running."

Service outages, however brief, inevitably come under intense scrutiny, underlining the growing importance of Web services for consumers and businesses. Last year, for example, Internet giant Amazon(AMZN Quote) was in the spotlight after its S3 cloud storage service went down, prompting a media feeding frenzy.

AT&T's outage came on the same day as the company unveiled its Synaptic Compute as a Service product, its latest cloud offering. Built on hardware from Sun Microsystems(JAVA Quote) and software from virtualization giant VMware(VMW Quote), the telecom firm will soon offer computing power as a cloud service.

Available sometime during the fourth quarter, Synaptic Compute as a Service will be accessible through a Web portal, and extends AT&T's cloud strategy. The firm already touts cloud storage, but is now offering customers 'pay as you-go' computing power.

Cloud services, which typically offer computing power or data storage via the Internet, have been gaining momentum recently, with companies such as IBM(IBM Quote), Microsoft(MSFT Quote) and Verizon(VZ Quote) all pushing the technology.