Cellphone Networks Survive Inauguration, Mostly
nandemoari writes "Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to dissipate.
Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, and AT&T also had some difficulty that morning."
If the phone infrastructure is down, then texting is actually less reliable. I think Slashdot posted an earlier story about how texts actually piggyback onto the spare bandwidth of the network's phone infrastructure; the texts do not travel on a separate network. This goes to explain why your text wasn't received until almost an hour later...