It’s weird to me that the providers aren’t communicating to customers about this. What if you were waiting for a call from a doctor, or similar?
The on-call person couldn't get the call due to an outage :(
UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
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Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#32I see we’re still using Down Detector as a source for stories, which may as well be called People Are Talking on Twitter Detector. It doesn’t do anything smart, it’s just looking for keywords on social media, sometimes by coincidence this indicates an actual outage.
Google can detect flu break-outs much faster than the CDC for example, because people tend to search for symptoms before they let anyone know officially, visit a doctor, etc.
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diff with Rogers is that they took out their entire network: cellular, home/biz internet, home phone, corporate circuits (including MPLS links), most cable TV, a bunch of their broadcast radio (AM/FM) network just dead dead dead. Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because…
In a financial company I worked at we would do some of the biggest, riskiest changes at 5pm on a Friday (or Saturday evening if we were worried about impacting international trades). The logic being that we would have the most time to fix things before markets open monday.
Our release window is Saturday morning. All the support people are on, most users are not, gives us 36hrs.
We absolutely do not release during week if we can help it. But we are traditional ERP application so pretty much everything we do is contrary to the HN/modern zeitgeist :-)
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#34BT, EE: Yes. Three, Vodafone: No. O2: Unknown. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go > A spokesperson from BT, which owns EE, apologised and said the firm was "currently addressing an issue impacting our services". > Vodafone and Three have confirmed to the BBC they do not have network issues.
45 minutes later, another reply here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674209) suggests that Vodafone and O2 are indeed experiencing issues.
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#35I see we’re still using Down Detector as a source for stories, which may as well be called People Are Talking on Twitter Detector. It doesn’t do anything smart, it’s just looking for keywords on social media, sometimes by coincidence this indicates an actual outage.
If it's stupid but it works it isn't stupid. Many S3 outages are on Down Detector minutes before the AWS status page reacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41770111
Was about to say the same. So many of my colleagues looki] for officially confirmed statuses if a cloud provider, AI, blockchain or github starts acting funny and troubleshooting problems thinking it's their own systems. My response is: did you check for people talking on X? About half an hour later there's an official incident.
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#36BT, EE: Yes. Three, Vodafone: No. O2: Unknown. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvmvqrnq7go > A spokesperson from BT, which owns EE, apologised and said the firm was "currently addressing an issue impacting our services". > Vodafone and Three have confirmed to the BBC they do not have network issues.
I think O2 is OK. My phone company is not O2, but it uses their network.
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#37China watching with open eyes. This will happen the day that they try to take Taiwan, worldwide, in my opinion.
Only if they absolutely need it. Nobody would spoil an asset like that. Maybe they would turn off mobile in Taiwan if they control their network. I didn't check which technology provider they use.
I don't think it would permanently spoil anything. China would just stop the phone network from being used to coordinate a response.
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#38Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#39I wonder if it will be the same cause as the big Rogers outage in '22, a good old fashioned BGP botch. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rogers-commun... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
Diff with Rogers is that they took out their entire network: cellular, home/biz internet, home phone, corporate circuits (including MPLS links), most cable TV, a bunch of their broadcast radio (AM/FM) network just dead dead dead. Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because…
The '22 Rogers outage, hah. As I recall it didn't affect me at all since I was at home and work in Vancouver all day… but it was a great excuse for not responding to workplace on-call messages which I got in the evening
> Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon.
Didn't know that part, amazing.
It sounds kind of like connecting to a WiFi access point which has a broken/non-working uplink to the Internet. Modern smartphones pretty much automatically detect and avoid such APs, and indeed the whole SSID if they need to, but it sounds like the stuck-in-1985 2G baseband layer has no equivalent connectivity check.
Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diff with Rogers is that they took out their entire network: cellular, home/biz internet, home phone, corporate circuits (including MPLS links), most cable TV, a bunch of their broadcast radio (AM/FM) network just dead dead dead. Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because…
I know one outcome of it was to ensure that they were equipped with SIMs for Competitor networks just in case
You're saying that Rogers personnel now have non-Rogers SIM cards?