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

I hope you're not completely unaware of the irony

[presidenteloco]

of receiving emails from people telling you that they can't communicate with you.

What he did was legalize Spam.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

So in other words, Al Gore funded the internet.

As I understand it, what he did was sponsor legislation to open the Internet / ARPANet, to general use, including commercial use, removing the limitations on who could connect and what they could say. Prior to that the connections and traffic had to have some connection to education, the military, or dealings with them.

So on one hand he helped give the general Internet a great boost, enabling it to become the public utility we know, love, and use.

But on the other hand he effectively legalized Spam, because going from very limited business uses to any business use is OK took away the main tool for suppressing unsolicited commercial email and network newsgroup postings.