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Business Wire back up after outage

By Sudarshan Varadhan

(Reuters) - Business Wire, the press release distribution company owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc, resumed services after it suffered a four-hour outage on Monday, delaying the release of many company statements including Alcoa Inc's earnings report.

The disruption was due to a power outage at a third party co-location facility, Chief Operating Officer Richard Deleo said in an emailed statement.

The outage was not related to a cyber attack, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Business Wire's feed went down just before the U.S. stock market closed, with the last release reaching Reuters at 3:44 p.m. ET. The feed at Reuters resumed at 07:15 p.m. ET.

Business Wire's system is fully operational again, Richard Deleo, Chief Operating Officer of the company said in a statement.

For most of that time, Business Wire's website carried a message that read, "The Business Wire site is currently unavailable, but will be back shortly." It asked users to access news releases via Yahoo Finance and other websites.

Business Wire handles the press release dissemination for thousands of companies, including more than half the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Alcoa Chief Executive Klaus-Christian Kleinfeld told CNBC on Monday that the glitch at Business Wire had delayed the release of the metal company's quarterly earnings report, which marks the unofficial beginning of earnings season.

Many companies such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Twitter Inc have moved away from using the services of companies such as Business Wire and its peer PR Newswire Association LLC, choosing instead to release their statements on their websites or through social media.

(Reporting by Sudarshan Varadhan, Subrat Patnaik and Arunima Banerjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza and Andrew Hay)