Outage cuts cellphone service in Argentina

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINE: An outage left about 16 million customers of Spanish telecom company Movistar without cellular phone service on Monday in Argentina, sparking protests on social-networking sites.

The company is dealing with "an issue reported at a general level with the data, voice and SMS (text messaging) network" and is working to "fix it as soon as possible", Movistar, a unit of Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, said in a Twitter posting.

Some 50 million cell phones are in service in the Argentine market, or about 10 million more units than the country has people.

Movistar competes in Argentina with Mexico's Claro, Personal, a joint Argentine-Italian company, and US-based Nextel.