Community Chat

[Mersha]

I wish I had my old copper landline back.

Those were the days.

[LavernLuvsShoes]

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@Sunshine Kate wrote:

Does anyone know the cause of the outage?

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Russia, or perhaps China? 

[cowboy sam]

In Illinois...I have Verizan for my Tracfone....cell service  and Don't have it!!...

Friends cell service is AT&T  and  has no service either!

But my landline from AT&T works and have wifi!

We went to another town 12 miles east of us...and hair dressers at beauty shop didn't have cell servivc either!

[Estellee]

Seems fishy, we may never get an explanation about this one.

[Enufstuff]

@Sooner@Kachina624@Nightowlz   That is my concern with our reliance on cell phones and computers. It can happen. That is why I keep my landline, don't pay bills online, don't keep all my personal information on my computer or keep all my money in the bank. Even the gas pumps to fuel our cars are computerized.

We will be at a total loss if all connections ever go down. The population will be wandering around bewildered, not even able to buy food. Never mind getting money from the bank, there would be no computerized cash registers in the stores.

Every area of our lives has become dependent on being connected and relying on computers.

I maintained public school computer records for 32 years.

But I had paper files and volumes of records too. We need to have backup and not totally rely on computers that can fail.

Six years ago, someone at a school did something wrong and it knocked out the city computers in 30 schools, City Hall and other administrative departments, and all the payroll departments for three months.

Can you imagine the chaos? It took three months for IT to find the problem, fix it and restore the service and reset everything,

including printers, across the city.

We had to do everything manually all that time. Then when computers were back, we had three months of backed up work to do. It was quite a nightmare.

Now, I would never rely only on computers, I have backup on

everything. I have a cell phone, but I don't live on it or have any personal information on it.

Anyone who would propose doing away with land lines, is short-sighted, ignorant of the detrimental possibilities and has no common sense.

[lynnie61]

Finally got my service back around 130.  Pittsburgh AT&T.  I've heard other companies, but said the outages reported were a lot lower.  

I bet we never hear the real reason.  

[deepwaterdotter]

Fox News reported that the outage was due to an AT&T software update gone wrong.

[Mersha]

Per CNN Business:

What caused the outage?

That’s still unclear. AT&T hasn’t identified a specific cause, and officials are investigating.

However, telecom industry experts say outages happen — and typically for mundane reasons. That can include everything from construction crews accidentally piercing a fiber optic cable to software glitches caused by human error.

 

Updated 5:43 PM EST, Thu February 22, 2024

[SharkE]

They got hacked.

[ALRATIBA]

At home - my phone works off my WiFi.  I did get text messages on and off during the day.  

I wasn't outside today ... but I did see an alert in my email that AT&T (my provider) had an outage.