Live data from Hacker News

ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

tennessean.com

91–100 of 517 posts

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#91

additional angle to consider under tinfoil: building ran telecommunications and the telecom outage affected the nashville airport, altering some flights https://twitter.com/Fly_Nashville/status/1342566428386488324... not to make a mountain out of a molehill, but thought experiments are good exercise.

It rarely hurts. It is certainly unusual in a lot of ways. The warning being probably towards the top. Before it was part of the news, I wondered why the initial police encounter resulted in cops immediately calling for a bomb squad. I will admit that my initial thought was that this building was one of the windowless NSA buildings. I guess I was wrong.

The bomb squad was called because the RV literally had an intercom saying there was a bomb inside and to evacuate the area, the police apparently also briefly inspected it.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#92

Looks like somebody didn't like Wonder Woman 1984. I think folks on social media are overthinking the motive. A lot of people (most?) hate telecoms and big tech companies (including their employees and contractors) and someone decided to stick it to one. There are so many reasons for this, some logical and valid and some conspiratorial nonsense. In the end, it all boils down to the fact that living under the watch of…

Yeah, I fully expect more incidences like this to happen all over the world. The incentives, socioeconomic backdrop, technical feasibility, and widely accessible tech are all enablers.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#93

Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU

That voice announcing evacuation sounds very professional, not like a computer synthesized voice... I wonder if they will try to trace that.

If they do, it will be a case of no good deed going unpunished.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8

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!

Maybe she was right, and there were two voices? The female announcement sounds like it was edited. Badly. This might explain the strange verbiage as well ("All buildings" stands out. That particularly phrase, with its inflection, sounds like it originally came from the end of a sentence too). I've heard other people say it sounds like the same voice used by the city during the summer protests or something along those lines.

For the purposes of arguing, let's say someone got ahold of some municipal evacuation recordings and chopped them up for this. It's not likely they had enough phrases to warn people a bomb would be going off in specifically fifteen minutes.

EDIT: For anyone curious about other instances of bad edits, listen to the word "this"; there's another word before that, and it was cut off: "thi-this area must be evacuated now". Also, "if you can hear this message, evacuate now." It's not likely any professional voiceover person would announce this way, nor would anyone who's paid attention to basic edits before consider this passable.

If this is all true, I guess the next question to ask is who would have access to those announcements, and who would think to use them? Most people would probably just use some text-to-speech thing unless it was easy/they had good reason. I'm probably overthinking this, though.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#95

Whoever did it seems to have been inside the RV at the time? Or a body was -- they say they found human remains. I don't think this person wanted to kill anyone. 15 minute warning, low population, date & time. Was it someone who really didn't like AT&T?

They found human remains nearby. No indication that the bomber was in or anywhere near the van. The van was parked in that spot for over a day.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It honestly reminds me of something from an Ocean's movie, where they destroy some piece of infrastructure just to get past a security camera or something

But the 5G conspiracist angle actually makes a ton of sense.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#97
post #44

Earlier 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.

While that's true, I think two factors strongly indicate that this was targeted at the ATT building. The first observation is, of course, that the ATT building was the closest to the explosion. A direct witness to the RV broadcasting the evacuation message, who lives across the street, describes this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8 . The second observation is the evacuation message itself. How often…

I think bombers broadcasting warning messages is somewhat more common with certain types of political violence. I know weather underground bombings tried to choose times for their bombings when buildings would not be inhabited, not always successfully.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#98
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was the first person in my town to get residential ISDN back in ~1996. I was a fledgling admin on the network team and work paid for it. It took me almost three months to help the local telco get it up and running, but we could never get 64kbps on the data channels because of some weird issue with the switch. (Still beat the hell out of dial up) I think your comment is the first time I’ve read or thought about the…

Bellsouth took a few days to get my ISDN up and running and it worked great for about a year [0] - then it went down and they couldn't get it working again. Bonded ISDN channels at 128kbps was amazing - fast, and no waiting 15+ seconds for an analog modem to handshake.

[0] Uzi Nissan was my ISP, famous for vigorously owning nissan.com. I was sorry to hear that he had passed away this year from COVID-19. https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-internet-domain-owner-who-fo...

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#99
> I think bombers broadcasting warning messages is somewhat more common with certain types of political violence. I know weather underground bombings tried to choose times for their bombings when buildings would not be inhabited, not always successfully.

Just wanted to point out that dressing things up as "political violence" is a disservice; violence performed in the commision of promoting an ideology is terrorism.

edit: I expected this to spark conversation; I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people would rather downvote than respond.

Re: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

#100
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> officers and witnesses heard a broadcast coming from the RV giving a dire warning: “Evacuate now. There is a bomb. A bomb is in this vehicle and will explode." Then, the voice started a 15-minute countdown. Metro Police Chief John Drake said the six officers at the scene quickly began to evacuate the area, going door-to-door. They redirected a man walking his dog along the street. This is surreal. Almost a scene fr…

Was pretty common (though not consistent) for the IRA to phone ahead to warn where they'd put bombs.

Ironically it was on an occasion when a bomb was phoned in that led to the single biggest atrocity during the troubles. 29 people killed by a cat bomb in Omagh. We may not be living in peace today has it not happened
Post reply on HN