Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: AT&T Tweets Service Failure

Written by Erin Barker

Friday, April 10. 2009 at 11:15 AM EDT Post a comment

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After a fiber cut left thousands in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area without phone or Internet yesterday, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) has been keeping its customers updated through -- what else? -- Twitter Inc.

AT&T Nearly 3,000 people are following AT&T's updates on the situation (which some speculate was an inside job by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) ).

"All of my real-time updates have been coming from the AT&T Twitter feed," CEO of VerticalResponse Janine Popick, whose company has been affected by the outage, told CNET.

Of course, there's no word on how affected customers follow Twitter feeds if their Internet is out...

In other news:

As newspapers continue to feel pressure to make ends meet, the LA Times has resorted to printing a giant front-page ad that looks, well, a lot like news. The ad, for NBC's upcoming Southland, has some LAT staffers up in arms.

"This place already had horrible morale problems with decimating layoffs, but now to have our publisher whore out the front page is more than we can stand. It blurs the line between paid content and content that our reporters are producing," one staffer told Reuters. Others argue that newspapers should be more flexible and adjust to meet the demands of the challenging ad market.

In lighter news, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and the Phoenix Suns' Shaquille O'Neal appear to be flirting back and forth on Twitter. Shaq, who has almost 600,000 Twitter followers -- and an original take on spelling and grammar -- initiated the exchange by Tweeting on Saturday: "I'm lookin foor u mark cuban." Cuban, who has paid for his Twitter transgressions before, responded "you know where i live..." The back and forth continued until this cryptic Tweet from Cuban on Monday: "shaq found me. wish I could say what happened. I kept my cool."

Tags: AT&T, Social Networks, Technology

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