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Technology Stocks : WCOM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maven who wrote (4894)	8/16/1999 9:03:00 AM
From: VFD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

Amen to that. I am holding on to my shares for now. I still think this will be a great investment and all these problems will be forgotten within 6 months. BTW Maria B. from CNBC just mentioned that Morgan S. had some nice things to say about MCI and that it appears to be opening higher.

To: Maven who wrote (4894)	8/16/1999 11:57:00 AM
From: Tunica Albuginea	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

USA TODAY : MCI glitches anger customers: CBOT on indefinite backup. usatoday.com MCI glitches anger customers By Del Jones, USA TODAY An MCI WorldCom outage that halted Internet service, made many ATM cards useless and disrupted futures trading ended Sunday after 10 days. But it did not end criticism of the telecommunications giant. The exact source of the problem remained a mystery. Service was restored when the company removed the Lucent Technologies software added during an upgrade that started the outage Aug. 5. The glitch caused an estimated 15% of the company's network to fail, having an impact on 30% of 12,000 customers who rely on it for high-speed data transmissions. The impact was widespread because many of those customers are banks and Internet-service providers, whose own customers were inconvenienced and angry. MCI WorldCom has received more criticism for keeping customers in the dark and downplaying the seriousness of the situation than for the outage itself. When AT&T had a shorter but more widespread outage last year, chief C. Michael Armstrong gave daily updates. Late Sunday, MCI WorldCom issued a two-paragraph statement with an apology from CEO Bernard Ebbers. Spokeswoman Linda Laughlin says the company wanted to make certain of information released. "Our customers want the facts and deserve the facts." Powerline Internet Service of Plainview, Texas, posted on its Web page Sunday that it was getting the "runaround" from MCI WorldCom, and "explanations are lame, to say the least." The Chicago Board of Trade accused MCI WorldCom of issuing "hollow assurances" that the network system would be fixed. That caused it to delay switching to a backup system, costing it 46,000 lost contracts each day. But such assurances were made last week when MCI WorldCom believed it was making progress, Laughlin says. This won't be the last outage as data begins to dwarf voice transmission, says telecom consultant Jeffrey Kagan. "I can imagine MCI did everything they could do to avoid this," but they couldn't stop it, he says. The only insurance is a backup plan, Kagan says. The Chicago Board of Trade says it will stay on a backup system indefinitely.