Below is the prepared script of my national radio report last night
regarding the nationwide AT&T mobile services outage. There were a few
very minor variances from this text during the actual presentation, as
I adjusted on the fly for the breaking news that AT&T confirmed the
cause was software related, etc. -L
- - -
This is one of the most spectacularly bad technological failures I've
seen in my entire career. The nationwide AT&T mobile wireless network
was down for numerous hours - voice, text, and data, and AT&T basically
communicated nothing of use as to what was actually going on. Finally
after about 11 hours (a bit after 3pm eastern) they said they'd restored
all service. We know that it apparently wasn't a cyberattack, it wasn't
solar activity related or anything exotic like that.
It appears most likely to have been caused by something far simpler,
gross incompetency by AT&T. Various government agencies are already
involved but AT&T apparently does not have comprehensive answers for
them yet. My top guess all day has been that they were rolling out a
software update or some such, and had cascade failures across the
country, and sources seem to now be confirming that was the cause. The
problems apparently started around 4am eastern standard time which is
right around when you'd expect software or other updates to be rolled
out to a network like AT&T's.
But major failures like this don't happen unless you're doing something
VERY wrong, and the negative impact on safety critical systems is
enormous. I've heard that even AT&T's FirstNet network for emergency
responders was also impacted in various ways, and ordinary subscribers
across the country were unable to even reach 911. Only AT&T's network
actually was out, though the other two major carriers may have become
congested as a result of the AT&T outage, and smaller cell firms that
use the AT&T network like Cricket would be out just like AT&T
subscribers.
Pretty much all AT&T had to suggest during all this was using Wi-fi
calling, which is useless without a compatible phone or if you don't
know how to set it up, or aren't near a working Wi-Fi access point that
itself doesn't depend on AT&T wireless, and so on. Or if you're one of
the many people whose only Internet is from their phone wirelessly. AND
people were being told to reach emergency services by using landlines!
And this, as we've discussed in the past, after AT&T has spent years
pushing people to often substandard wireless services. Meanwhile
they've been ripping out the copper landlines which have been the only
reliable communications during power failures and a broad range of
emergencies.
Landlines are still widely used for all sorts of critical services for
safety, security, health alert monitoring, elevators, on and on. Long,
long list. AND AT&T has been making promises to regulators and the
public for years about putting in fiber that they've never followed
through on, and in some cases even when they've put fiber into a few
areas, they refuse to let everyone nearby connect to it. Again, awful.
And this massive failure by AT&T occurs just when they've got
proceedings going here in California in which they're asking to end all
landline services, with hearings at the California Public Utilities
Commission both this month and next month.
This enormous breakdown today demonstrates with crystal clarity why the
CPUC should deny AT&T's requests to terminate landlines now, and leave
so many people (including some of the most vulnerable), in such
potentially dangerous situations, and if you're interested in learning
more about this I've put up links to the 2 CPUC proceedings about AT&T's
push to kill landlines. Those links are on my main homepage toward the
upper left, on VORTEX.COM -- V O R T E X.com -- and you can read any of
the thousands of comments there and also leave your own comments.
The nationwide ATT mobile wireless outage today has to be the most
serious possible warning we could have imagined about the dangers of
depending on mobile services, and why conventional landlines are still
so very important. This day is going to go down in history as one of the
most serious tech failures ever, and if we don't learn from it, we can
only expect things to get even worse in the future with even more lives
put at risk.
<END>
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
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