SAN ANTONIO - AT&T Inc. customers in the Southeast United States were unable to connect to the Internet through their DSL service for several hours Monday night because of an equipment problem, a company spokesman said.

Michael Coe, a spokesman for the San Antonio-based telecommunications company, said the digital subscriber line service was restored about 10 p.m. CST. Customers in nine states in the company's Southeast region were affected.

"The root cause of the disruption is still being investigated but appears to be an equipment impairment," Coe said in a statement.

Coe said the outage affected customers in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.

At the Internet forum DSLreports.com, people in several of those states posted reports of problems. Many said it appeared to be an issue with AT&T's domain name servers, which help direct Internet traffic to its destinations.

Every computer connected to the Internet is ide.jpgied by a series of four numbers known as an Internet Protocol address, such as "165.1.59.220." Domain names allow Internet users to type in something like "ap.org" instead of the string of numbers to navigate to a Web site or send an e-mail. Domain name servers match the name to the equivalent numeric address.

Several users at DSLreports.com said they were able to access the Internet during the outage by changing settings so that their computers would use alternate domain name servers.

On the Net:

AT&T Inc.: http://www.att.com

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