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

Closer to true than you might think

[dcooper_db9]

What Al Gore actually said was "I took the initiative in creating the internet". In context his statement is true. No, he did not invent the internet. But he was the first politician to recognize that interconnecting computers could have benefits far beyond improvements in science. He realized that the network should opened up to everyone. As far back as the 1970's Gore was involved in legislation involving technology and he worked tirelessly to educate other politicians about technology. He wrote bills that funded research in robotics, magnetic leviation, biotech, image recognition, speech recognition just to name a few. He wrote the bill that funded Mosaic and also wrote the bill that essentially privatized the Internet.

If you want to know more about how Gore "invented the internet" take the initiative and find a book. It's a fascinating story.

Re:Closer to true than you might think

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, Al Gore funded the internet.

That isn't in "other words", that is precisely what he claimed to have done.

And it is still true. Before Gore passed legislation to allow private telecoms in the mix, the name Internet wasn't used until after his funding to publicize the Arpanet.

On the Arpanet, an ISP wasn't something you could call up and get connected with as a normal pleb.
You could only get access from a university and then only as a student there in some class that needed it, although access wasn't always revoked after said class, but generally was upon graduation depending on the university.

Inventing the Internet doesn't mean he also invented each (or any) piece of underlying technology, no more than when Vint Cerf and Bob Kanh invented TCP doesn't mean they invented phone lines that TCP operated over.

Can you hear me now?

[niftymitch]

OK networking is designed to be routable and redundant.
Now if all traffic must pass through a fort that used to have no signs
or a bit of Utah so hot and far from anyplace that only Octopussy could
think of ...

In all fairness for phones to go down because an Internet backbone failed
tells me that all our phone company laws need revision at all levels.
At one time a POT had obligations of reliability and redundancy that
seem to have flipped to a binary work or is broken.

I recall mothers day calls where you got all signals busy because of
the surge. At least the management was not Uber imposing hidden
surge pricing.

This is an opportunity for good questions at the VP thing tonight.