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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

#381

Post by Scoundreller »

jjav wrote: post #370
SpaethCo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOTP or SMS, it's just another text password you're entering in that's fully phishable. TOTP just "feels" more secure.

No, TOTP is far more secure because it has no dependence on a third-party who can mess up in many ways (Denial of service like in this case by being unavailable, Impersonation by allowing SIM swaps or intercepting messages directly). You fully control how to store the TOTP seed and how you compute the value, so it is far more secure. Yes, it can be phished if you fall for that, but it removes several attack vectors.

> You fully control how to store the TOTP seed

Sorta. The seed still needs to be issued to you in some way.

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

#382

Post by Animats »

Scoundreller wrote: post #351
lxe wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity and scale of moderns systems are on another scale of magnitude.

And centralized. Data is cheap (though they won’t admit that) while big iron cellular core stuff is expensive. Funny when they billed extra for long distance calls even though all calls were routed through one place for a huge geographic area. Calling your neighbour could be a hundreds of miles round trip over mobile.

> And centralized.

Yes. Too much of routing is centralized. Since phone numbers are no longer locative (the area code and exchange number don't map to physical equipment) all calls require a lookup. It's not that big a table by modern standards. Tens of gigabytes. All switches should have a database slave of each telco's phone number routing list, to allow most local calls if external database connectivity is lost. It may be behind, and some roaming phones won't work. But most would get through.

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

#383

Post by twisteriffic »

bostonwalker wrote: post #375
Scoundreller wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traffic worsened because drivers weren't able to optimize their routes, or even get directions to their destination During Canada’s Rogers outage in 2022: > In Toronto there was some dependency on Rogers. One quarter of all traffic signals relied on their cellular network for signal timing changes. The Rogers GSM network was also used to remotely monitor fire alarms and sprinklers in municipal buildings. Public par…

This is putting it mildly. The Interac network went down and no one could use their debit cards nationwide.

Not all of it. My credit union's interac services still worked.

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

#384

Post by Tarball10 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #62

Verizon and T-Mo both issued statements that they have no outages and the issue is just their customers being unable to call AT&T customers. Looks like most of the AT&T network in the US is down though.

A theory for the reported Verizon/T-Mobile issues is that when AT&T went offline, all of those phones went into SOS mode and tried to register on the remaining available networks (Verizon and T-Mobile) to allow 911 calls to be made. The surge in devices registering at once may have overloaded some parts of those networks.

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

#385

Post by Diederich »

Animats wrote: post #331

This is a serious architectural flaw. In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster, or, on one single occasion, a major fire in NYC. The AT&T Long Lines system in the 1960s and 1970s had ten regional centers, all independent and heavily interconnected. There was a control center,…

In this context, what's the physical scale of a 'central office', as far as regional dimensions? Thanks!

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

#386

Post by ok123456 »

Animats wrote: post #331

This is a serious architectural flaw. In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster, or, on one single occasion, a major fire in NYC. The AT&T Long Lines system in the 1960s and 1970s had ten regional centers, all independent and heavily interconnected. There was a control center,…

There was the Mother's Day outage of 1990. That was caused by someone swapping a break statement for a continue statement in some C code that handled the routing, and there was a cascading effect.

Then again. That only affected long-distance service.

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

#387

Post by GravityLab »

jader201 wrote: post #276

Something 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 deliverie…

We need to maintain paper-based systems of information storage and retrieval. People should be familiar with a physical map. If we are too dependent on the technology, that is a risk.

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

#388

Post by Animats »

lxe wrote: post #347
Animats wrote: post #331

This is a serious architectural flaw. In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster, or, on one single occasion, a major fire in NYC. The AT&T Long Lines system in the 1960s and 1970s had ten regional centers, all independent and heavily interconnected. There was a control center,…

The complexity and scale of moderns systems are on another scale of magnitude.

Watch "Without Fail" (1967), on how the Bell System did it.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAJpionUxJ8

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

#390

Post by dfadsadsf »

offmycloud wrote: post #324
standardUser wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that GPS does not rely on cell service.

GPS on most cell phones uses data connection to download current satellite data in order to decrease the time from cold start to GPS lock. Lack of cell or WiFi can cause GPS to take 5-15 minutes to "search the sky" and download satellite data via low bitrate channel under poor signal conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS Edit: You can think of it as a CDN for the GPS almanac.

That’s just not true for modern phones. I use iPhone on hikes without cellular connection and GPS lock is instantaneous. Organic Map app is great for hiking.
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