Not to defend them or minimize the corporate stupidity, but it sounded like there were less than 100k people affected out of tens of millions (100m?) accounts. I get that it was a big deal for those affected, but a 0.1% outage doesn’t seem “major”.
I think the reported numbers are coming from downdetector.com, which relies on self reporting and people being aware that the website exists. I imagine many more customers were affected. Also, anything the prevents emergency services communication, which occurred during this outage, should be considered a major outage imo
My understanding is that emergency services are either 2G or a mesh infrastructure (perhaps both? I am still learning tech.
No there is dedicated LTE and 5G bans for First Responders. Normal users can use it, but when First Responders connect to it they deprioritze everyone else on the band.
Not to downplay your point, because you are correct, but the outage did not affect anyones ability to contact emergency services, so that is a huge plus in the whole disaster. Any cell phone that pings off a cell tower can reach 911, even if there is no service activated on the phone. It’s important that people are aware of that fact in case they are in a situation where they can’t pay their bill, but still have an emergency.
I did not have SOS service on my phone for about 6 hours yesterday. So you are incorrect in that all people were able to contact emergency services. ATT, Upper Midwest
It literally affected emergency services’ ability to contact each other in multiple areas of the country.
I do know that FirstNet was impacted. The tablets in our fire apparatus couldn’t connect which is kind of a pain in the neck because we use that to navigate, locate fire hydrants and view their flow capabilities and whether they’re out of service, store maintenance phone numbers, view building blueprints and material safety data sheets, view responding apparatus and locations, identify helicopter landing sites, etc.
Like the job will still get done but it does throw a wrench in our ability to coordinate larger responses.
I was impacted and it sucked. Having no cell service for 8-9 hours is not fun. Can’t make or receive calls or texts, every app that requires or uses an internet connection (like Waze) was impacted. Whole Waze worked with directions using offline maps and GPS, you don’t fet stuff like traffic conditions and rerouting.
But when you only have a cell phone and limited wifi resources at the office, it’s a major pain in the butt. And I didn’t report so that 70k could’ve been a conservative number of people that reported.
Yeah, but this is lemmy so… the outrage is very real. Even for most of the people complaining about it that don’t even have AT&T.
