Business workers use their BlackBerry devices during a meeting in Canary Wharf in central London March 6, 2008. REUTERS/Toby Melville

NEW YORK (Reuters) - AT&T Inc said on Wednesday that its mobile data services such as Web surfing had stopped working very early on Wednesday, primarily affecting customers in the Northeastern United States and that the company had fixed the problem just before noon.

The exclusive U.S. provider for Apple Inc’s iPhone, which is popular among web surfers, said the problem did not affect voice calls, text messages or mobile e-mail on Research In Motion Ltd BlackBerry devices.

“We identified it as a routing issue in the way data is routed to and from wireless devices,” said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.

He would not provide more details about the cause of the problem which affected the company’s fastest data network as well as its older slower data services.