Gentlepeople: For those who are interested, there was a significant outage begining at approximately 9:30 Am or so,and ending approximately 2:00 Pm (+/- few mins..), past Saturday, here in Hawaii. The outage was caused by a contractor operating a 'backhoe' which severed an AT&T Cable. AT&T is at a loss, in explaining why redundant systems did not take up the slack. They are investigating.. All sorts of functions from Paging to Retail Service Systems to Transit and Inter-Connect Services were effected. University of Hawaii' external data services were effected (Primary and Secondary DNS were not functional). Furthermore, 2nd and 3rd tier services (communities whose data service needs are supported by the University.. State Gov.) were also among the communities that were effected. AT&T is outwardly being responsible about this -- suggesting that effected AT&T consumers immediatey contact their account reps at AT&T to begin processes relating to settlement.. All I wish to know is: WHO was it that let that WILD BACKHOE get on a barge for Hawaii? Hmmmm? All the best.