this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (7 children)

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”.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My understanding is that emergency services are either 2G or a mesh infrastructure (perhaps both? I am still learning tech.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Than what is 2G still used for?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ATT doesn't have a 2G network anymore. They phased it out in 2017.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Good to know thank you for that information.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

No problem, home slice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It literally affected emergency services' ability to contact each other in multiple areas of the country.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Our firstnet was also down. That defeats half of the reason for it, the other being dedicated against network congestion.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

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