June 1, 2006

Verizon Wireless had a brief service outage on Tuesday evening that affected customers in southern New Jersey, after equipment at a switching center shut down due to overheating.

Verizon Wireless spokesperson Sheldon Jones said that a heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) unit at the switching center failed, and caused “high temperatures in one of our switches.”

The equipment shut down, Jones said, due to a combination of high outside temperatures and the failure of the HVAC unit.

Temperatures in New Jersey on Tuesday reached more than 90 degrees, according to The Weather Channel.

The four-hour outage began at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday evening and affected the New Jersey counties of Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Mercer and Salem. Service was restored around 11:30 p.m., Jones said.

Jones said that although Verizon Wireless has “a number of redundancies in place” to prevent outages, “in this instance it just happened that a piece of equipment went down, and that impacted us.”

Source: RCR