Major cellphone outage reported in New York

Sprint Nextel Corp. said an outage of its cellphone service in parts of the New York borough of Queens on Thursday was caused by water damage to network equipment due to a burst pipe.

"The outage came amid intensified airport security after British police said they had foiled a plot to blow up several aircraft flying between Britain and the United States. Two major New York airports -- JFK and LaGuardia -- are in Queens."

Verizon expected the problem to be fixed by evening.

A New York police spokesman said the alert it sent out about the outage was "an FYI." "It has nothing to do with anything else. It's not criminal," the spokesman said.

emily | 8:56 AM | News, Buzz |
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