back up in NY
Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
271–280 of 486 posts
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also fun where the towers remained just powered on enough for phones to stick to them but not be able to do anything, so 9-1-1 calls would just fail, instead of failing-over to other networks. Seems like a deficiency in the GSM spec (or Rogers SIM programming?) that I don’t think was actioned on. Actually, I think this is going to change after the Rogers outage, it's just slowly happening behind the scenes so it's…
Say there is an outage at the 911 call center. Now you try to call, don't get through, and your phone writes off that tower. Who were you planning to call after 911? Too bad, should have placed that call first.
Your phone would try other towers from other providers. If 911 is experiencing an outage that’s a separate issue that needs to be mitigated at a different layer. Even still, 100% uptime is difficult and expensive.
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#273It’s likely unrelated,
but bad timing for AT&T as they have applied to end landline service in some areas of California.
https://www.wired.com/story/att-landline-california-complain...
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speculation is fascinating. For most people, their guess is a reflection of themselves. Is there a term for that? This is a gross generalization, but I've seen... - Science people guessing solar flares - My "right-wing friend" guessed international hackers - I, myself, guessed it was a botched software release - Someone in this post commented their military friend says get gas And yet, like everyone else, I genui…
My speculation is: “Higher-ups kept demanding that technicians ‘do more with less’ in order to deliver on quarterly metrics and now we’re finally seeing the cumulative result of employees being stretched thin, underpaid, and overworked.” You are welcome to infer as to why I’m thinking this way!
This is my bet; and mayyybe some external bad actors taking advantage of the situation on top of that.
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#275I wonder if this is a cyber incident. Curious if any telecom folks know what the most likely explanation for an event like this would be, and what telltale signs/symptoms might first indicate this was caused by something nefarious.
> However, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is “working closely with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage and its impacts, and stand[s] ready to offer any assistance needed,” Eric Goldstein, the agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement to CNN.[1] [1] - [ https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/22/tech/att-cell-service-outage/... This isn't telling of anything, righ…
by itself, not telling of anything per se.
like, you could commit a dumb BGP config and break lots of stuff. have done that in the past, actually...
but any time a national-tier ISP has a national-level outage, that warrants a look from multiple orgs. and given the number of threat actors like china, NK, iran, and russia, who are, and have, made aggressive efforts in this space -- and have strong reasons to do so now -- its not crazy for the US fed'gov to want to know a little more, and offer to help. but again, entirely possible it's unrelated.
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#276Something I'm not seeing discussion on:
What is/were the cascading effects of this, particularly for drivers?
Many people in buildings were unaffected, as they could fallback to wifi. But I imagine this had a pretty broad impact to drivers.
Just a few things I can think of:
- Packages delayed (UPS, FedEx, Amazon, truck drivers, etc.) for drivers that relied on their phone's mapping apps to get them to their deliveries
- Uber/Lyft/taxi/etc. drivers not able to get directions to their pickups/dropoffs
- Traffic worsened because drivers weren't able to optimize their routes, or even get directions to their destination
Maybe larger companies have their own infra for this, or have redundancy in place (e.g. their own GPS devices)?
I'm curious to hear thoughts on whether these (and others) were impacted, or if there are ways they're able to get around this.
Also, unrelated to drivers, I can imagine there is/was a higher risk of not getting treated for emergencies due to not being able to make calls (I'm not sure whether/how emergency calling was impacted).
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Caches make problems fun too. Quite often you see automated tests that check how well your cache/in memory data are working. But when some other customer that isn't in the hot path tries to access their request times out. I've seen a lot of people making automated checking systems fail at things like this.
The phrase “the hardest parts of computer science is caching and naming things” come to mind.
I see 2 things here but you're off by one.
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#278To everyone trying to speculate on the root cause, I haven't seen enough information in any of the comments to really draw any conclusions. Having worked on several nationwide cellular issues in Canada when I worked in telecom, we saw nationwide impacts based on any number of causes. - A new route injected in the network caused the routing engines on a type of cellular specific equipment to crash nationwide. This too…
The speculation is fascinating. For most people, their guess is a reflection of themselves. Is there a term for that? This is a gross generalization, but I've seen... - Science people guessing solar flares - My "right-wing friend" guessed international hackers - I, myself, guessed it was a botched software release - Someone in this post commented their military friend says get gas And yet, like everyone else, I genui…
I literally caught myself thinking about a cyberattack merely because its sort of exciting (albeit terrible). And then realizing despite its prominence in my mind, it’s probably not the most likely cause (although certainly plausible still). And furthermore, that my mind gravitates to that without any real information suggesting it over other explanations. More about fearing for the worst instead of what you want I think.
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still down for me too.
down all morning in ATL but back up at 1PM EST
Back up in Cartersville, north of ATL @ 13:12. Oddly enough my text messages say they went through at 12:43 but my response to someone's message when once my phone had everything roll in at once is timestamped 13:12
Re: Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speculation is fascinating. For most people, their guess is a reflection of themselves. Is there a term for that? This is a gross generalization, but I've seen... - Science people guessing solar flares - My "right-wing friend" guessed international hackers - I, myself, guessed it was a botched software release - Someone in this post commented their military friend says get gas And yet, like everyone else, I genui…
My speculation is: “Higher-ups kept demanding that technicians ‘do more with less’ in order to deliver on quarterly metrics and now we’re finally seeing the cumulative result of employees being stretched thin, underpaid, and overworked.” You are welcome to infer as to why I’m thinking this way!
Obviously you’re a self loathing executive.