AT&T, the nation’s largest phone services provider, said Wednesday that the data services outage which affected states in the Northeast was fixed. The phone services provider said the outage only affected the Web surfing, while voice calls and text messages remained unaltered.   

The services outage came as the Dallas, Texas –based company makes efforts to keep up with the increasing demand on its data network especialy since the iPhone 3G was launched. AT&T is the sole provider of Apple’s iPhone 3G in the United States.

"We identified it as a routing issue in the way data is routed to and from wireless devices," said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel, Reuters reported. No further details on AT&T’s services outage were given by Siegel.

The company is also currently working to repair its telecommunications network on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Gustav. AT&T dispatched more personnel in order to cope with the situation in areas worst hit by the hurricane such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

In a statement on its Web site, AT&T advises phone users who are in the affected areas to text message rather than call. A text message will surely go through quicker than voice calls simply because they require less network resources.