Copper thefts leave AT&T customers without service - Dallas News | myFOXdfw.com

Thieves descended on one northwest Atlanta neighborhood last Friday morning, stealing and huge chunks of copper phone cables.  AT&T officials say it happened in the Collier Heights neighborhood along Linkwood Drive, and thousands of customers were affected by the outage.

A team of AT&T techs in bucket trucks high above the ground replaced stolen cable along a 300-foot stretch of busy Linkwood Drive on Monday.  The theft left an estimated 2,000-3,000 thousand residential and business customers without phone and internet service.  

Concerned residents told FOX 5 it's not the first time this has happened, and some worry opportunistic thieves have preyed on their community.  

The loss of service was much more than a nuisance for some who lost their home security monitoring systems  when the lines went dead.

AT&T has offered a $3,000 reward in this case.  Officials say copper theft is a growing problem for the telecommunications company, with thieves going out of state to sell the metal.