Americans reporting nationwide cellular outages from AT&T, Cricket Wireless and other providers

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 69 points –
Americans reporting nationwide cellular outages from AT&T, Cricket Wireless and other providers
apnews.com
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Looks like they need to increase the service fees then. Those poor monopoly telecom companies are hurting so much.

I saw on the local news this morning that an AT&T outage meant that people on mobile networks other than AT&T couldn't call 911 here (San Francisco Bay Area). Their suggested workaround was to make sure you have wifi calling enabled. Okay cool thanks I'll just make sure that my emergencies only happen in areas with good wifi.

The best part of it too was for Wi-Fi calling, if it was off, couldn't be turned on since it relied on AT&T's website/capabilities to approve and authenticate. That was at least my experience as well as my family's.

So if you hadn't already enabled it before the outage, you literally couldn't turn it on.

Thankfully I already had it enabled since the area in and around my house seems like a dead zone for cell phone signal. I only have one bar of signal when I'm inside.

Supposedly a Cisco software update went wrong and took everything down for a while. That's the rumor.

The whole point of having a landline was that it worked when the power was out.

This was a network outage not a power outage.

Yea I am aware. My point is that an analog system doesn’t have network outages unless the physical copper wires are all down.

Digital systems are much more fragile.

All phone systems are digital now. Even what appears like POTS at the subscriber end turns into VoIP when it reaches the phone company.

Analog telephony was still built on a complex automated network. Those rooms full of operators manually connecting callers by plugging in physical wires haven’t been a thing for 70 years. They even started going digital in the ‘60s.

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Cue every one of the factory workers at my job to crack jokes about a Chinese invasion all day

I get being surprised about the others being down, but what did you expect from a provider called Cricket Wireless

Cricket shill here. I've had cricket for years, it's affordable and has good perks like free roaming in Mexico and Canada. It's just an MVNO of ATT last I checked, so if ATT went down cricket would too.

Solar storm started yesterday too. Coincidence?