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Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

cnbc.com

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Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#71

Post by pierat »

ssimpson wrote: post #61
softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I'm just curious how we as a society manage the uptime of such a critical service? Do we have laws or enforcement in place to regulate / enforce how well basic cellular service (at least the emergency tier) must work in the US? Just imagining the dropped emergency calls today, etc? (Genuine question)

usually redundancy. but as these companies squeeze more and more out of gear, we risk large cascade failures that are hard to recover from. could also have been some kind of firmware upgrade. anecdotally, the 4G LTE phones seem to not be affected whereas the newer 5G ones seem to be. maybe it was a botched deployment. i'm sure ATT will give us a really well rounded RCA ;)

> i'm sure ATT will give us a really well rounded RCA ;)

Knowing most megacorps, they'll blame some midlevel engineer doing a "bad" thing, when it was ordered from above.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#72

Post by neom »

ssimpson wrote: post #64
neom wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has 12 and nothing, I have 14 and am fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

very odd. i was thinking some kind of firmware whatever deployment gone wrong, but maybe it is something more nefarious.

tbh it reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out... I was in Canada when that happened and it was a mixed bag on what would work, there didn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#73

Post by dylan604 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I'm just curious how we as a society manage the uptime of such a critical service? Do we have laws or enforcement in place to regulate / enforce how well basic cellular service (at least the emergency tier) must work in the US? Just imagining the dropped emergency calls today, etc? (Genuine question)

Even a landline could have emergency calls disrupted if a line was cut somewhere. unless every device was behaves as a router with more than one signal in/out, there will always be a potential for loss of signal and interruption of service.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#74

Post by isaacdl »

Downdetector's front page[0] seems to indicate issues with other carriers as well - Verizon and TMobile. There are are several other providers showing on the front page, but I think a lot of them are MVNOs on the big three networks.

[0] https://downdetector.com/

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#75

Post by SkyPuncher »

softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I'm just curious how we as a society manage the uptime of such a critical service? Do we have laws or enforcement in place to regulate / enforce how well basic cellular service (at least the emergency tier) must work in the US? Just imagining the dropped emergency calls today, etc? (Genuine question)

911 is regulated. I’m unsure on anything else (I simply don’t know).

People/companies that actually care already have a second line and are taking very good note of this.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#76

Post by bombcar »

joshstrange wrote: post #65

Seeing "SOS" only on iPhone currently. I got worried something had gone wrong with auto-bill pay since I only noticed after I was driving. It's interesting how naked I feel without access to the internet. I reach for it way more often than I would have ever guessed, something you only notice when it's not there. Last March my area saw large wind storms that knocked out power for almost a week (I'm not in a rural area…

My earliest computers were amazingly capable and powerful devices, I could do anything I could think of and spend hours and hours on them.

Now my computer is insanely more powerful but without an Internet connection it feels dead and useless.

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#77

Post by lionkor »

testfrequency wrote: post #63
softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I'm just curious how we as a society manage the uptime of such a critical service? Do we have laws or enforcement in place to regulate / enforce how well basic cellular service (at least the emergency tier) must work in the US? Just imagining the dropped emergency calls today, etc? (Genuine question)

I don’t have anything positive to add, except noting that FirstNet is also down. I’m sure there’s a lot of chaos for emergency responders right now :/

If FirstNet is down that would mean a lot more is down than should be. FirstNet can operate on lower range radio, no?

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#78

Post by no_wizard »

joshstrange wrote: post #65

Seeing "SOS" only on iPhone currently. I got worried something had gone wrong with auto-bill pay since I only noticed after I was driving. It's interesting how naked I feel without access to the internet. I reach for it way more often than I would have ever guessed, something you only notice when it's not there. Last March my area saw large wind storms that knocked out power for almost a week (I'm not in a rural area…

Portland, is that you?

This happened to us with the recent storms a month or two back, some places didn't have power restored for 2 weeks+

Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users

#79

Post by rixthefox »

bombcar wrote: post #31
oceliker wrote: post #6

This is so odd. I have two phones with AT&T currently sitting right next to each other. One has service, the other is in SOS mode.

Does it still show bars in SOS mode? Or is SOS just “I dunno can’t see no cell towers but maybe it’d work?” I wonder if the MVNOs that piggyback on AT&T are showing down also. If not, it’s some AT&T service authorization system that exploded.

On the latest iPhones, SOS mode is the emergency fallback to satellite service. It's really meant to be used in situations where you're well outside of any sort of service area but you have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky.

Your iPhone will instruct you on where to point and help you track an emergency satellite that is manned by live humans who will take your emergency request and relay it to the proper people.

More specific info here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/104992

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