Storm Causes AT&T Outage Across Midwest

dstates writes "AT&T left users across several Midwestern states without cellular phone service yesterday. The outage apparently resulted from a power failure at a Michigan switching center and spread to affect level3 Internet communications. The powerful windstorm also left 400,000 users without electricity. Interestingly, except for a few reports in Chicago and Indianapolis papers, AT&T has managed to keep this out of the mainstream media. Widespread communication failures also followed Hurricane Ike in Texas earlier this year. With the increasing trend for users to drop landlines and rely only on cell phones, this is becoming an emergency preparedness issue." Yes this included me. Still does. At least my office still has power — maybe we'll just camp here tonight. :)

Comments

Re:Roaming?

[Shakrai]

I wish I had mod points for you. I used to work for a WISP and had the "privilege" of climbing towers in god-awful weather after storms to restore service to our customers. It's scary enough to climb the things in normal weather. Doing it Upstate New York in January after a storm has coated the tower with ice is absolutely horrible.

The worst part was that was my first job and I only got paid $10/hr to scale the friggen things. Looking back on it I wasn't making nearly enough money to be risking my life like that. At least our customers were appreciative though. That helped more than you can imagine.