This is truly strange. I'm thankful that nobody was killed. But what on earth is going on?
There are reports of human remains at the scene.
Oh dear :( I hadn't seen that
ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
81–90 of 517 posts
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#82Earlier 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.
It's probably not very productive to guess at the purpose with so little to go on.
But if that's what we're doing, then my bet is on "overwhelming law enforcement and emergency response so a different crime can go undetected".
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#83This article doesn't make this so explicit, but ATT infrastructure appears to be the intentional target of the bombing. You can see the building in the helicopter shot at the top of the NYTimes article on the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion.ht... Obviously a telecommunications/switch hub, with it being a large windowless building in a downtown core. The other thing that's particularly…
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
While I'm only speculating, it could be quite possible that whoever may have wished to damage or destroy the AT&T building, seriously underestimated what these kind of buildings can take (essentially being disguised bunkers).
This certainly wasn't a small explosion, from the looks of it. But taking out a bunker .. unless you have access to weapons specially build for that purpose, good luck.
That AT&T still went down, may just demonstrated an apparent oversight in their emergency procedures for this site. I don't know the details, but having backup generators that rely any public infrastructure sounds like a pretty bad choice. That said, maybe those generators first burned through a decent supply of diesel fuel, only to later rely on (in this case absent) gas.
I have no idea how much diesel would be required to keep that site running for a prolonged period of time. Maybe such an amount could pose regulatory/safety issues on its own. Nonetheless, the sole purpose of emergency generators is to provide power that does not depend on any external factors (maybe aside from air/oxygen). So to me this story does sound at least a bit weird.
But somebody targeting that building and totally underestimating their chances, even if they may have still succeeded partially (if only by "luck") .. nah, that can not surprise me at all.
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#84Anti-5G crazies? T-Mobile partisans?
Speculation at this point will get us nowhere. If there were some reason like "5g bad" or "dont kill movie theatres" (regarding HBO max release of WW1984) there would be a video from the bomber pushing their message since, otherwise, this looks like any other terror attack.
Speculation at this point will get us nowhere
You follow this, immediately with speculation into the bomber's methodology and tactics?
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. In many European countries ISDN was widespread in the mid-to-late ‘90s. There were millions of customers in Germany alone, I think. It was slow compared to the DSL connections that replaced it, but I don’t remember hearing too many negative things about ISDN reliability. (I bet the only real legacy of this technology is the album by the Future Sound of London which is named ISDN.)
I could have this wrong but we had offices in Amsterdam and Berlin and ISDN in Europe wasn't nearly as polluted with old standards as it was in the US. I don't even think a 56kbps B channel was an option in Europe. I stood up dial plants in both continents and I distinctly recall it being plug and play over the pond. We also used the ISDN to back up our circuits and Cisco had a pretty cool demand system that would ju…
The most brutal thing I saw was when someone compromised a customer ISDN router (the small Ascend boxes with the curses UI) and changed the creds to login to their ISP and disconnected it and forced it to redial repeatedly. The local telco charged you for every ISDN call if it was a business line and since ISDN call initiaton/setup are instant - they had a several thousand dollar phone bill. I recall seeing the RADIUS server getting slammed with auth failure for days when that happened.
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting things to consider. 1) I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? 2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!
> I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? Reports of gunshots weren't fake because multiple witnesses heard gunshots. No idea if it was related to the bombing or not. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index.... >McCoy said he was originally woken up by what he believed were gunshots prior to the explosio…
The prevailing theory is that there were no gun shots, but gun shots were played over the speakers to wake people up so they would evacuate.
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#87Reports that most of Tennessee is without 9-1-1 service right now:
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32982150-AT-T-Suffers-outa...
And AT&T mobile is down across Kentucky: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32981927-Services-Suspicio...
Also reports above that calls into Tennessee aren't working.
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#88This article doesn't make this so explicit, but ATT infrastructure appears to be the intentional target of the bombing. You can see the building in the helicopter shot at the top of the NYTimes article on the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion.ht... Obviously a telecommunications/switch hub, with it being a large windowless building in a downtown core. The other thing that's particularly…
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
There is 0 doubt that they were targeting the hub, they parked right beside that building, not on the side of the street with restaurants. There is a gaping hole in the side of the building, though how much damage was done isn't known. Some services were affected before they had to cut the generators, per some reports. Internet and cellular is still down, and our DirecTV local channels went black right when they cut the power. I suspect they redirected that because it came back an hour later well before cellular and internet.
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
Could just be good planning if they knew that was procedure after an explosion.
It could be interesting for regulators to see if anyone "miraculously" managed to make a lot of money from/during this incident, because some people do have the resources to pull something like this off and make a profit from it. But I think it's rather unlikely.
Aside from that, I seriously doubt that just disruption of AT&T services was the objective here. Considering that this appears to have been a rather serious explosion, I guess the intent was more likely destruction rather than disruption.
With the amount of 5G nut jobs running around these days, I suspect that it is far more likely that somebody just seriously underestimated what it takes to bring down a building like this one.
But I guess that time will tell (more). I'm just speculating of course.
Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville
#90I am overcome with curiosity about who did this and why. The fact that nobody has claimed responsibility makes no sense. If this were a politically motivated attack, domestic or otherwise, it would almost defeat the point to have the name of your cause omitted from those initial headlines. And sparing the lives of the bystanders also doesn’t make sense for a political attack. I heard the NRA gave warnings but the reason why it’s basically unheard of is because it defeats the point of terrorism. The reason why Muslim extremists, the bonafide experts, make a point of killing lots of people is because it’s effective. What political organization has it in for att?
It can’t be political. Every day that goes by without someone claiming responsibility, the probability of it being political decreases exponentially.
But at the same time, this doesn’t seem like the work of a lone wolf. Lone wolfs usually try to kill people. And almost invariably they fail miserably, killing practically no people at all compared to the number of people that would have been killed at the hands of someone smart or competent with a weapon. And bombs stand out as being difficult for lone wolves to get right. For a lone wolf to build a working bomb and detonation system and have everything work perfectly the first time would be the exception, although not the only one.
This was done by one person. Not a typical lone wolf but someone who was smart and methodical. And I would guess he was in the vehicle when it exploded. He was either insane ala templeOS, had no motive ala Mandalay bay, or a disgruntled employee.