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ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

tennessean.com

11–20 of 517 posts

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#11
post #4

Watching the impact on the network through downdetector today has been interesting. If I wanted to be conspiratorial I'm reminded of Room 641A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

What sort of conspiracy are you imagining here? Someone exploded an RV in an entertainment district so that AT&T had an excuse to disable service while the NSA installed wiretaps? I think that as investigations unfold, that will not end up being what happened. Just a guess though.

To be fair, if it was true, no investigation would publically uncover that either. It would come out as some sort of lone wolf, x or y supremacists, anti-vaxx, anti-5g, nutjob.

If you allow for conspiracies to exist, it becomes harder to judge truth since all facts become subjective.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#12
post #4

Watching the impact on the network through downdetector today has been interesting. If I wanted to be conspiratorial I'm reminded of Room 641A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

What sort of conspiracy are you imagining here? Someone exploded an RV in an entertainment district so that AT&T had an excuse to disable service while the NSA installed wiretaps? I think that as investigations unfold, that will not end up being what happened. Just a guess though.

> I think that as investigations unfold, that will not end up being what happened. Just a guess though.

Obviously if the NSA is involved, the results won't be "NSA did it," even if they did (which they almost certainly didn't).

Incidentally, a decade ago I would've said "definitely" instead of "almost certainly"...

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#13
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of conspiracy are you imagining here? Someone exploded an RV in an entertainment district so that AT&T had an excuse to disable service while the NSA installed wiretaps? I think that as investigations unfold, that will not end up being what happened. Just a guess though.

Given what little we know, targeting the AT&T infrastructure could be a reasonable guest a motive. The blast itself didn’t seem to take the hub offline; there was a broken water main followed by AT&T being refused access to the building by emergency response. It appears that things started cascading a few hours later, presumably once the generator fuel was exhausted.

Back when I worked in a CO the engineering goal was to be able to run the building load on gen for at least 24 hours straight before getting fuel trucks. We had weekly gen tests to validate things were working as expected.

It could be that they had to de-energizd some equipment to perform inspection and work within the facility. I know our facility had a number of procedures on how to de-energize parts of the building and inhibit the generators from feeding that area (a lesson learned in the Hinsdale CO fire years ago).

During Hurricane Katrina a number of us had to invent a procedure for de-energizing non critical equipment to reduce power load in order to keep critical services running for an extended period of time since it was clear we werent going to get utility and resupplies for awhile.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given what little we know, targeting the AT&T infrastructure could be a reasonable guest a motive. The blast itself didn’t seem to take the hub offline; there was a broken water main followed by AT&T being refused access to the building by emergency response. It appears that things started cascading a few hours later, presumably once the generator fuel was exhausted.

Back when I worked in a CO the engineering goal was to be able to run the building load on gen for at least 24 hours straight before getting fuel trucks. We had weekly gen tests to validate things were working as expected. It could be that they had to de-energizd some equipment to perform inspection and work within the facility. I know our facility had a number of procedures on how to de-energize parts of the buildin…

This was one of the big old ATT COs

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#17

Watching the impact on the network through downdetector today has been interesting. If I wanted to be conspiratorial I'm reminded of Room 641A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

That would require both an "agency ready to do uncontrolled explosion in public" conspiracy and "they can't splice fiber quickly enough"... anti-conspiracy?

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#18
post #9

The building (185 2nd Ave N) the RV exploded in front of appears to host a lot of equipment: https://www.telcodata.us/search-switches-by-zip-code?zip=372...

Yep it's the main spot in nashville for voice stuff. Has local access switches (dms 100), tandem, and LD goes out of there. At&t I think also has their long haul optical transport and some core ip backbone stuff there.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#19

Watching the impact on the network through downdetector today has been interesting. If I wanted to be conspiratorial I'm reminded of Room 641A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Upon seeing the reports of the location of this specific real-world incident I researched to try to find an article I know exists describing how indestructible those windowless telecommunications hub buildings are. Isn't there an article somewhere describing how they're hardened against unconventional military attack? Visually the Nashville structure seemed very very well reinforced. As for the NSA angle, this locati…

I was surprised how effective pretty primitive homemade shaped charges are.
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