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:they should really plan for this

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> think of some sort of system of interconnected networks

Talk to Al Gore. I heard he has an idea.

W9ABC this is K6XYZ

[argee]

W9ABC this is K6XYZ, over ....
(no answer)
W9ABC this is K6XYZ, over
no answer
Dial up on cell.
"Hey, Harry, turn on your damned radio!"
"OK"
W9ABC, this is K6XYZ, over
K6XYZ this is W6ABC, I hear you 5 by 5 now!

Lesson: This is a fine example of communications redundancy ... errrr ...

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:I didn't notice any outage.

[LynnwoodRooster]

Sure! There's an app for that!

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?

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.

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.