ATT major outages

[Ranger99]

Got a message and the radio "news"
people say that there's a major (national?)
outage of telephone and cell phone
services. Haven't heard of any explanation
yet. No information from ATT
Golly gosh gee whiz.
Who'da thunk it?
Sensitive electronic equipment failure?
Wowee . . . . . .

[gypsyman]

 Somebody pushed the wrong button! Either that, or Biden tried to text and got all the circuits crossed!!

[Ranger99]

The official explanation is a botched
software update, and all the officials
and the "news" people are emphasizing
and stressing and repeating that it for
sure was absolutely not a cyberattack,
repeat not a cyberattack, repeat was
absolutely positively irrefutably NOT
a cyberattack from hostile forces.
They said services were interrupted for
around 12 hours, which is true.
One thing they up and said here was
one municipal 911 service was overloaded
and nearly unusable from individuals
calling 911 " to see if it worked "
I'm really surprised that the panic and
terror of having their phones not working
was even reported on the "news".
It should wake many from their complacent
stupor, but it does not. I had a message
from a "fan" that I was an alarmist and
chicken little and other choice tidbits.

Oh well.  . . when the cell service and
internet does actually go black, I guess
everybody will just have to panic and
wail and moan.  You can only tell somebody
so many times

[wtxbadger]

Still waiting on a reasonable explanation on this from AT&T and betting we won't get one. Landlines are a thing of the past and it's darn near impossible to get one when you move. The next best alternative seems to be a sat phone and prices for it have been going down from what I hear.

[Ranger99]

IMO communication satellites aren't
immune to failure. We've already seen
lasers whacking combat drones, so
I'm not doubting that there's "killer "
satellites as well. That's been hashed
about in the Reagan days as "Star Wars "
and written in fictional novels that
I've read from before and around the
same era. I've always imagined that
a military version of a plasma cutter
existed that could shoot out at a
distance. There's a lot of military
technology that probably exists that
people will blow off as impossible
or science fiction etc.
"They" always used to say
Today's science fiction is tomorrow's
science.

[wtxbadger]

Figure we'll never hear what the real cause of the outage was.
I worked for a large independent oil company a few years back and one of their young IT people was assigned the task of updating a computer for one of the regional offices. The kid was fresh out of college and had little experience. Instead of just updating that one computer/server he made a mistake and that update went out to every office across the US and caused a complete network outage across the company offices for almost two days before they finally got everything up and running. Needless to say the kid got fired over it but who should have actually been fired was his supervisor who didn't oversee the task at hand with a green employee.

[Ranger99]

I'm afraid we've put all our
eggs in one basket, and the
basket has frayed spots.
Everything in the whole blankety
blanking country relies on a
working, functioning computer
grid, and if it fizzles just a wee
bit everything grinds to a halt.
The city infrastructure here was
nearly shut down not long ago
because of ransomware, and
as far as I know, they didn't fix
it and probably paid off and didn't
say publicly. The public library was
all but closed, and many billing
and records offices were pretty
much in the twilight zone.
These pinhead criminals have figured
how to hack into these computerized
security systems and the houses
that have everything covered with
cameras, and they break in and
loot and other crimes and such.