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UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

the-independent.com

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Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#51

Post by addandsubtract »

Scoundreller wrote: post #12
yabones wrote: post #4

I 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…

> their phone was on roaming with Rogers and therefore dead

I thought your phone uses all available networks (ie the strongest one) while roaming. Is that not the case?

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#52

Post by codezero »

hollerith wrote: post #49
aftbit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.

If that were possible, then why didn't Russia, which might have the most experienced pool of cyber-attack skills in the world, do it to Ukraine?

they sincerely didn't think they'd need to

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#53

Post by ifwinterco »

hollerith wrote: post #49
aftbit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.

If that were possible, then why didn't Russia, which might have the most experienced pool of cyber-attack skills in the world, do it to Ukraine?

They did try, but ukraine were suspicious something was going to happen (massive army suddenly forming near their border) and they had spent time securing stuff

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#54

Post by signal11 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #33
ecshafer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Being able to release safely during the week is super important for eg financial services, for fairly obvious reasons.

In trading and market making contexts for instance, we release 100s of times a day — including Fridays. This includes bog-standard infra changes like roleswaps and server rebuilds. The releases that happen on weekends tend to be highly disruptive infra changes, eg unexpected changes to some kind of physical connectivity where we’re not comfortable with carrying weekday risk.

We didn’t explicitly set to to optimise QoL for engineers (the real driver for safe intraday change was being responsive as a business) but not usually being on call on weekends was a big plus.

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#55

Post by pmontra »

nailer wrote: post #37
pmontra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No mobile network can be an inconvenience but who has to respond will have the means to communicate no matter what. Furthermore every single common person will feel a personal level of danger and they won't simply shrug about the destiny of a remote island somewhere on the map.

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#56

Post by sim7c00 »

hollerith wrote: post #49
aftbit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.

If that were possible, then why didn't Russia, which might have the most experienced pool of cyber-attack skills in the world, do it to Ukraine?

it would get them nothing.

they did attack satcom systems to the point of bricking them.

what do you think would happen if you turn off critical infra for a country?

mass civilian death/suffering. military likely hardly affected but extremely motivated...

its counter productive.

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#57

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

aftbit wrote: post #47
mmsc wrote: post #13

China watching with open eyes. This will happen the day that they try to take Taiwan, worldwide, in my opinion.

I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.

That's stage 2. Stage 1 is election fixing, subversion and capture of foreign governments through bribery and kompromat.

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#59

Post by cess11 »

ifwinterco wrote: post #53
hollerith wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were possible, then why didn't Russia, which might have the most experienced pool of cyber-attack skills in the world, do it to Ukraine?

They did try, but ukraine were suspicious something was going to happen (massive army suddenly forming near their border) and they had spent time securing stuff

They'd also done it on and off for like a decade already so everyone was used to it and had mitigations in place.

Re: UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

#60

Post by messe »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #57
aftbit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think there's a better than average chance that WW3 starts not with an open nuclear exchange as our parents imagined, but instead with a substantial cyberattack which shuts down power, water treatment, communications, hospitals, public transportation, etc. This might even be deniable / grey zone for a few hours or days while the belligerent parties use the chaos to accomplish some Blitzkrieg style attacks.

That's stage 2. Stage 1 is election fixing, subversion and capture of foreign governments through bribery and kompromat.

Yeah that's why we're expecting stage 2 next.
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