Toll-free phone service interrupted in five Midwest states

CHICAGO (AP) -- Toll-free phone service in five Midwestern states was interrupted for nearly four hours Wednesday due to an overloaded Ameritech server, a spokeswoman for the phone company said.

The cause of the overload was not immediately known, said Denise Koenig, regional spokeswoman for the Chicago-based company.

Service was interrupted about 8:15 a.m. CDT in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois, she said. Callers dialing 800 numbers in the region were unable to get through, hearing fast busy signals.

Partial service was restored about an hour later, and the company said full service was restored by 12:10 p.m. CDT.

Ameritech is owned by SBC Communications of San Antonio and has more than 12 million phone customers in the five Midwestern states. Ameritech affiliates Southwestern Bell and Pacific Bell were not affected.

Although mainly affecting calls passing through the Midwest region, AT&T spokesman Mike Pruyn in Chicago also reported sporadic trouble with toll-free calls placed to and from other areas of the country.

Pruyn said all major long-distance carriers had been affected by the outage problems.

WorldCom spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said the outage appeared to stem from a problem at a traffic switching facility near Chicago operated by Ameritech.

"We're working to reroute calls as appropriate, and we're working with Ameritech to help sort it out," Baker said.

Ameritech has been plagued by soaring customer dissatisfaction since its 1999 acquisition by SBC, incurring millions of dollars in state fines throughout the region for failing to meet installation and repair service standards. This year, however, the number of complaints has dropped and even its critics have acknowledged an improvement in service.

Ameritech said its problems, which reached a peak last year, were partly due to the fact it had too few technicians to deal with service requests. The company recently hired more than 1,400 new technicians.

Koenig said she was unaware of any previous server overload.