How do you reach out without Internet, cellular, or phone?

For about two-hours today, the AT&T network in the southeast United States was completely shut down; affecting customers in St Augustine and St Johns County until about 2:10 p.m., according to information provided to Historic City News this afternoon.

Although the exact source of the outage is not yet known, the phone company is saying that they believe the problem originated in Alabama.

“It is unusual, to say the least, that all of our communications resources would be unavailable at the same time in such a wide service area,” an AT&T spokesman in Birmingham told local reporters.

All markets that were formerly Southern Bell, later BellSouth, and are currently serviced under the reconstituted “AT&T” service mark, were impacted. The outage included everything from broadband U-Verse, Internet, cellular service, and plain old landline telephone service, and stretched from Alabama east to Georgia and south to Florida.

“It was strange not to be able to reach out to anyone unless we lowered the window and stuck our heads out to holler,” Historic City News editor Michael Gold said. “We’ve been an AT&T customer since our inception, and we rely on the phone company for voice, U-Verse, 4G wireless and data services.”

The network link from our servers to our readers is part of our AT&T data service, however, we have a redundant system that automatically switches to another provider in the case of an outage like this. So, as long as you weren’t an AT&T customer, you had uninterrupted access to our content.

“The services have been restored for about an hour now, and I have not seen any residual problems,” Gold said.