Outage Knocks Out All Major Phone Providers On the East Coast (dailydot.com)

Every major phone carrier experience outages on United States' east coast this morning at around 11am local time. The outage lasted for about 45 minutes. DownDetector, which monitors outages of services, confirmed AT&T, Verizon, Charter Spectrum, Comcast, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, US Cellular, and Vonage among others were affected. From a DailyDot report: T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted about the incident, pointing to issues with Level 3, a major internet backbone. Other tech firms quickly pointed to a Level 3 outage as well. No specific information has been released on potential causes of the outage or consequences that may result from it. Business VoIP providers (Resource: https://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+Business) were unaffected as they run over internet connections.

Comments

Re:Can you hear me now?

[bobbied]

I just have to laugh some times when I see my fellow hamateurs spout off about how much ham radio helps. When your little Baofeng 1/2 Watt portable can't hit the repeater because it has no electrical power then there won't be much you can do.

I know of at least two repeaters which have battery backup (one which I help maintain) and I'm sure there are plenty more within the range of my Baofeng with spare batteries and the large mobile antenna I can hook up to. Then there is the mobile rig in the car, that's good for as long as I have gasoline to keep the battery charged. The repeater I help to maintain has an on site contingency plan to provide power from a portable generator should the need arise from an extended power outage so it could be on the air for days. SOME of us have plans for such things...

Heck, some of us even practice these plans doing that yearly contest called "Field Day" perhaps you've heard of it?