Some Qwest Internet service briefly disrupted

Some Internet service provided by Qwest was out for less than hour late Wednesday morning around the Twin Cities, hitting businesses and some residential customers, the company said.

The outage began about 10:30 a.m., affecting large and small users that rely on fiber-optic service, said Joanna Hjelmeland, a local Qwest spokeswoman. The company was looking into the cause, she added.

Among those affected were Minnesota Public Radio and the Star Tribune offices at the State Capitol and in Burnsville. As MPR's Kerri Miller started giving out the pledge website address on the air, someone told her "the web is down," which she repeated aloud and then gave out the pledge phone number.