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ATT’s botched network update caused yesterday’s major wireless outage
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Not to defend them or minimize the corporate stupidity, but it sounded like there were less than 100k people affected out of tens of millions (100m?) accounts. I get that it was a big deal for those affected, but a 0.1% outage doesn’t seem “major”.
I think the reported numbers are coming from downdetector.com, which relies on self reporting and people being aware that the website exists. I imagine many more customers were affected. Also, anything the prevents emergency services communication, which occurred during this outage, should be considered a major outage imo
My understanding is that emergency services are either 2G or a mesh infrastructure (perhaps both? I am still learning tech.
No there is dedicated LTE and 5G bans for First Responders. Normal users can use it, but when First Responders connect to it they deprioritze everyone else on the band.
Than what is 2G still used for?
ATT doesn't have a 2G network anymore. They phased it out in 2017.
Good to know thank you for that information.
No problem, home slice.
Emergency services use 4g LTE when they're connecting through a hotspot. They’re still have local radio communications, but anything network wise is regular 4g.
Not to downplay your point, because you are correct, but the outage did not affect anyones ability to contact emergency services, so that is a huge plus in the whole disaster. Any cell phone that pings off a cell tower can reach 911, even if there is no service activated on the phone. It's important that people are aware of that fact in case they are in a situation where they can't pay their bill, but still have an emergency.
Did you actually dial 911? Because if you tried dialing 911 and it didn't go through, that's a problem. ALL phones must be able to dial 911, even without service. If the phone can hit a tower, it can call 911.
If that's true, that's wack. There's no reason that the one phone company's service issue should have affected your phone's ability to call 911. Towers aren't company specific so it doesn't make sense that there would be interference 🤔 someone fucked up
It's not always about towers and signal.
There's call routes and service monitoring involved.
Call routing still has to happen to get you to 911. Service monitoring still happens to try directing your 911 call to another 911 dispatch center. If those two functions are broke, you get nothing no matter what.
Doesn’t That tower still need to route the call to 911? And if that routing is broken the call wouldn’t go through…I think?
Towers aren't specific to any single phone company, if you stop paying for your phone service entirely, you can still dial 911. It just hits off the nearest tower.
I was under the impression that a company (AT&T) owns the tower, and they can lease out connections from that tower to other providers. They are also required by law to route 911 calls for free, but I can see a scenario if they botched the routing where 911 would not be accessible from that tower.
They don't always own the tower. Like everything in America, another company fronts the cost, att pays them for tower use. And the other carriers. It's a business model.
That makes sense. I wonder how many AT&T towers were affected. To my knowledge, no one in my area on the east coast was affected if they tried calling 911, just standard numbers.
From what I have read, I suspect that you might live in an area that took so long to get 2G that 3G essentially leapfrogged it for you. Emergency services run on 2G a lot of the time, and I don't think any reports of 2G service being out.
Possible. All I know is calling 911 on my phone with cell only failed mid morning yesterday EST while I had no service. My local news put out an announcement the 911 operators were having issues receiving calls due to issues with ATT.
Connecting to WiFi to call 911 failed. Again, could be my county. Called non emergency local number over WiFi: success. They transferred me to 911
It literally affected emergency services' ability to contact each other in multiple areas of the country.
I know that, that's not what I'm talking about. My agency was also affected. I'm specifically talking about a cell phone's ability to dial 911. Every cell phone must be able to dial 911 regardless of service, for safety reasons. This has been a requirement for quite a while before the issues we had with AT&T. One phone company's IT blip should not have affected any phone from calling 911 specifically because service is not needed to do so on a normal day. Agencies wouldn't be able to communicate with each other if they AT&T services because you can't dial 911 from one agency to the next, it doesn't work that way.
I do know that FirstNet was impacted. The tablets in our fire apparatus couldn’t connect which is kind of a pain in the neck because we use that to navigate, locate fire hydrants and view their flow capabilities and whether they’re out of service, store maintenance phone numbers, view building blueprints and material safety data sheets, view responding apparatus and locations, identify helicopter landing sites, etc.
Like the job will still get done but it does throw a wrench in our ability to coordinate larger responses.
Our firstnet was also down. That defeats half of the reason for it, the other being dedicated against network congestion.
I was impacted and it sucked. Having no cell service for 8-9 hours is not fun. Can't make or receive calls or texts, every app that requires or uses an internet connection (like Waze) was impacted. Whole Waze worked with directions using offline maps and GPS, you don't fet stuff like traffic conditions and rerouting.
But when you only have a cell phone and limited wifi resources at the office, it's a major pain in the butt. And I didn't report so that 70k could've been a conservative number of people that reported.
Our company phones were affected (both cellular and our ability to phone out or take external calls on our traditional phones). For us, the outage started at 4am (edit: this is just when my small department noticed, we're not IT), could be that not everyone noticed.
Yeah, but this is lemmy so.. the outrage is very real. Even for most of the people complaining about it that don’t even have AT&T.
I agree.
On the other hand, cellular is pretty much critical infrastructure at this point with no pay phones. Also it took down some 911.
Some of the affected users were other systems, like Duo, which then caused downstream outages of even more thousands. That's why it's being reported that way.
I was affected. Haven't bothered to report since I wasn't seriously bothered. Might be different if I'd lost business or couldn't contact family