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AT&T Service Outages Hit The Midwest Friday (wgntv.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the offline-near-Ohio dept.

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes WGN: Customers using AT&T for phone and Internet reported widespread outages across Chicago and the Midwest Friday starting around 3 p.m. and going into the evening, according to the website DownDetector. In addition to Chicago, customers in St. Louis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati also reported issues like receiving a "Call Failed" message or a recording when they tried to make phone calls, or Internet simply not working. Outages in the Chicago area seem to have peaked around 8 p.m. The number of people registering issues on the website Outage Report seems to have peaked around that time as well.
The outage "has been repaired," reported an Indiana TV station early Saturday morning. Anyone else having connectivity issues? Share your stories in the comments.

21 comments

  1. World Series? by seven+of+five · · Score: 2

    Cubs home for World Series... everybody tuning in... wouldn't be surprised if ATT choked on traffic.

    1. Re:World Series? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      Cubs home for World Series... everybody tuning in... wouldn't be surprised if ATT choked on traffic.

      Then, everyone went over their allotment of "unlimited data" and AT&T throttled back their bandwidth.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  2. happended to me and my bro by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    tried to make calls with pots line dialed then got no tone this happened all morning and its still happening now using bros lappy tethered with Verizon only way i can get on the net since dsl is down

    peace
    ~ the necromancer ~

  3. So where exactly is this midwest? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Colorado? Utah? Wyoming? Arizona?

    1. Re:So where exactly is this midwest? by rfengr · · Score: 1

      From western Appalachian front, westward to: Mississippi River Crossing of Oregon and Santa Fe trail in KC Fort Leavenworth in eastern KS 98th meridian in central KS I suppose it's up for contention, and varied with time.

  4. Grab AT&T By the pussy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    This is just more progressive riggers trying to silence the king of all media Donald Trump.

    Trump 2016

    1. Re:Grab AT&T By the pussy by ITRambo · · Score: 0

      Your ignorance is quite substantial.

  5. Unsurprising by Zak3056 · · Score: 2

    Legacy telco does not seem to be able to build bulletproof networks anymore.

    Telephony is the original give nines application. In the past, and outage like this would probably have resulted in congressional hearings, but there have been numerous wide area outages from AT&T and other baby bells over the last few years, and the frequency of these outages just seems to get higher as years go on.

    --
    What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
    1. Re:Unsurprising by grumling · · Score: 2

      When the goal is to deliver 4KHz worth of audio that hasn't changed at all over the last 100 years, It's pretty easy to get to 99.99% up time. Note that 99.999% uptime was only for SONET level circuits. When the product is narrowly defined by you, you get the ability to define what reliable service is. Helps to have the ability to raise rates every few years even when your operating costs drop. Also helps to control the central office upgrade cycle. That way you can make damn sure that switch's software is mostly bug-free.

      Once you start running advanced networks it gets a little more hairy. And now that flat-rate pricing, instead of per-minute billing, is the norm, people are using the network much more than they used to. Because the upgrade cycle is less than 10 years, it makes sense to centralize as much as possible, especially for CPE provisioning and services. Years ago, switching for local calls was handled entirely within the local CO. These days there's going to be a virtual switch that could be located in another state, or maybe even just one or two for the entire country. If the local CO's link fails, or there's a badly managed maintenance order, what would have been isolated to a single town can now affect whole regions or even be national. But it helps keep the margins high and maybe keeps the competitors at bay.

      Not saying it's right, just saying that current network management practices encourage centralization. And maybe there's something to that. Fixing one (hot backed up) thing that can restore service to millions in a few minutes might be cheaper and better than single point of failure devices all through the network. Certainly easier to patch and maintain a few redundant servers than thousands of individual units.

      --
      "Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
    2. Re:Unsurprising by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2

      I doubt that they ever got even 99.99% uptime for end users. I distinctly remember occasionally getting "fast busy" signals when I tried to make calls (major metro area in the 70s), and it these downtimes almost certainly happened more than 52 minutes per year. Maybe the circuits were just overloaded, but my phone was still useless while it happened.

      They very well may have had *less* uptime than a decent ISP has now. The main difference is that with almost constant use of the internet, you're more likely to notice any outages and get annoyed.

    3. Re:Unsurprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's hard to build a bulletproof system when nobody wants to pay for it...

    4. Re: Unsurprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With at&t you're lucky if you get nine fives.

    5. Re:Unsurprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LEGACY systems are perfectly fine, time-proven over generations to be absolutely reliable. the problem is that telcos have moved too much stuff off of those systems and on to internet and IP, which will never be as reliable as POTS.

  6. Baby spike in 9 months by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I predict that 9 months from Friday there will be a huge spike in babies being born in the Midwest.

  7. Centurylink having issues as well by Zibodiz · · Score: 1

    I have no idea if it's related or not, but Centurylink's email servers were down yesterday; customers were unable to check for messages via POP3, and inbound messages would be bounced as undeliverable with unreachable servers. Not sure if it's related, or just sympathy pains.

    1. Re:Centurylink having issues as well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And FedEx tracking is still down, but being fixed as quickly as possible. Same message as yesterday.

    2. Re: Centurylink having issues as well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1998 called and wanted it's pop3 ISP email service back :-)

  8. Sigh by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    You know the Midwest, that vast swathe of the United States EAST of the Mississippi.

    It's like the Louisiana Purchase never happened.

    1. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I feel your pain. My state is considered "Midwest" by most people even though one end of it is very close to the Atlantic Ocean. It's crazy.

  9. SSL errors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've been running into a lot of "The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown" errors. It's not all sites though. Yahoo and Gmail are problematic, but my bank is accessible securely. I can also ssh out fine. Haven't dug into it too much yet, but wouldn't be surprised if one or more CAs were having issues. Right now I'm just curious to see if anyone else is having similar issues.