NYC Borough Hit by Cell Phone Outage

Water damage at a Verizon central office facility cut cellular service to thousands of Sprint Nextel customers in the New York City borough of Queens Thursday, amid the confusion following a foiled terrorist plot in London. Two of the city's airports -- JFK and LaGuardia -- are in Queens.

The outage affected around 75 of the company's towers in the Flushing section of Queens. While the problem cut service for Sprint customers, Verizon said that it was aware of no problems on its own network, or outages on its landline system as a result.

According to New York City police and Verizon, a water leak in a switching facility damaged equipment that transfers calls from the cellular tower to the standard landline telephone network. The outage affected users of the Nextel network; Sprint PCS users were unaffected.

Service was expected to be restored by last night, and no estimates on how many customers were affected was provided. The NYPD said it did not suspect any criminal activity and sent out its notice to the media as an "FYI."

The cellular problem is the second utility outage in Queens in a month. In July, portions of the borough spent up to a week and a half in the dark after damage to power lines cut electricity in the middle of one of the most intense heat waves in years.