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FCC Investigating Coast-To-Coast 911 Outage For AT&T Wireless Users (nbcnews.com)
AT&T says it has fixed a nationwide outage that prevented its wireless customers from making 911 emergency calls. "Service has been restored for wireless customers affected by an issue connecting to 911. We apologize to those affected," the company officials said in a statement. The outage was serious enough to gain the attention of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, said via Twitter that they are investigating what went wrong. NBC News reports: The company didn't say how widespread the outage was, but as reports poured in from across the country, Karima Holmes, director of unified communications for the Washington, D.C., government, said her office had been "advised there is a nationwide outage for AT&T." At 10:20 p.m. ET, about 10 minutes before AT&T gave the all-clear, DownDetector, a site that monitors internet traffic for real-time information on wireless and broadband carriers, indicated that outage reports for AT&T were clustered most prominently around New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. But emergency authorities across the country confirmed 911 outages and publicized direct police, fire and ambulance dispatch telephone numbers that AT&T customers should call in emergencies.
...outage reports for AT&T were clustered most prominently around New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle...
For service to be disrupted in cities all across the country in this fashion, either the 911 systems for AT&T are way too centralized to be safe, or this is a coordinated attack on several regional pieces of infrastructure at once (and it exposes a criminal lack of security I'd say). I wonder which way AT&T will want to go with this.
When this happened here in the D.C. area, I immediately got an SMS from the police about it,
and giving the regular non-911 number in case you needed it.
(Actually, got several of these alerts (DC-MD-VA), and also the service restoration announcement.)
AT&T is already a private company operating the part of 911 services that failed.
If you're going to threadshit with a political troll, at least put in the effort of not sounding totally ignorant.
My city runs its own POTS telephone network, and when they had a 2 hours, city-wide outage of the entire network that, of course, also happened to disable access to 911 (duh, no phone = no 911), they were fined $1.6 million by the FCC. That was $200 per capita.
So... by my calculation, AT&T ought to probably pay somewhere on the order of $20 Billion.
911 service is just another useless regulation that needs to be removed in order to allow mobile carriers to innovate. 911 services currently have a government-enforced and government-controlled monopoly on emergency-response services. The government has been undercutting the private sector in this major market for far too long, and it needs to stop. Lifting outdated regulations like mandatory 911 service opens up a market for wireless carriers to provide their own, private emergency-response services. Private companies can always deliver services in a better, cheaper way. It's time to eliminate this legacy, ineffectual, and demonstrably ineffective regulation from an industry that is barely surviving under the weight of government regulations. AT&T's outage shows just how badly this system needs to be eliminated.
Pai's investigation will certainly come to the same conclusion.
"One of the Linux servers was attacked by unknown hackers."
The 911 service really should be backed by something more reliable than the cheapest option...
Surely you mean it should be run on the most reliable OS (Linux) and subject to regular security reviews and penetration tests
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