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
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.
I did not have SOS service on my phone for about 6 hours yesterday. So you are incorrect in that all people were able to contact emergency services. ATT, Upper Midwest
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.
Correct. I had to connect to WiFi to use ATT calls over WiFi to call the non emergency number to be transferred to my needed emergency services. My local news station put out an announcement about ATT customers not being able to contact local 911 operators. May have had something to do with my county specifically. Still, a major issues.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I did not have SOS service on my phone for about 6 hours yesterday. So you are incorrect in that all people were able to contact emergency services. ATT, Upper Midwest
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.
Correct. I had to connect to WiFi to use ATT calls over WiFi to call the non emergency number to be transferred to my needed emergency services. My local news station put out an announcement about ATT customers not being able to contact local 911 operators. May have had something to do with my county specifically. Still, a major issues.
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.
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.
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