A widespread and hours-long outage dinged the reputation and the stock price of incumbent telecom company AT (NYSE: T) on Thursday. Like the outage itself the damage was contained; still, investors traded out of the stock, and it closed the day more than 2% lower. That compared unfavorably to the trajectory of the S 500 index, which rose at roughly the same percentage rate.

AT's wireless outage began around 3:30 a.m. ET on Thursday and affected people in cities throughout the U.S. -- Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta among them. It lasted for several hours. According to reporting from The New York Times, at the incident's peak approximately 70,000 reports were logged on the Downdetector.com outage tracking website.

The two other American telecom incumbents, Verizon Communications and T-Mobile US, also reported service interruptions, but at lower volumes. Verizon received 3,000 reports at a certain point on Thursday, and T-Mobile about 1,500.

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Source Fool.com