Martin Feinberg, Culver City Realtor, understands how important communication is in today’s world. It helps us stay close to friends and family and also conduct business with greater efficiency. For thousands of people on Monday though, those benefits were not available due to an AT&T software glitch that caused a nationwide outage for business voice customers.

The outage affected multiple areas of the U.S. including customers in Las Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and hundreds of other smaller areas. An AT&T spokesman acknowledged “an issue affecting some of our business voice customers” and stated, “we apologize to our customers who were affected.”

Culver City, including all Culver City Real Estate, was also affected. Some residents complained of problems with Internet and television access and wireless services, along with basic cellphone connection issues.

The company attributed the outages to a software issue but did not elaborate. Neither did it state how widely it affected AT&T customers in southern California.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was one business that was affected by the problem. The hospital contacted clients and others on Monday morning to let them know that landlines were “not receiving calls from the outside.” Later it stated on Twitter that hospital phones were down “due to a nationwide AT&T outage.” At 11:09 the hospital issued another Tweet saying that it was not receiving incoming calls.

Service appears to have been fully restored to most areas by Monday afternoon. Martin Feinberg, Realtor, hopes that the disruption did not cause too many problems for those who were affected.