A company spokeswoman said there were "scattered outages" in the state affecting fewer than 100 customers, not a statewide outage, as reported earlier.

At 12:30 p.m., a FairPoint customer service representative told Computerworld that service was down for the entire state and would be repaired in about 12 hours.

The spokeswoman said the affected customers would have service restored on a "case-by-case" basis. She said there were "individual issues" involved with each but did not elaborate.

FairPoint is based in Raleigh, N.C., and serves nearly 2 million customers in 18 states.