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
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.
It literally affected emergency services’ ability to contact each other in multiple areas of the country.
I know that, that’s not what I’m talking about. My agency was also affected. I’m specifically talking about a cell phone’s ability to dial 911. Every cell phone must be able to dial 911 regardless of service, for safety reasons. This has been a requirement for quite a while before the issues we had with AT&T. One phone company’s IT blip should not have affected any phone from calling 911 specifically because service is not needed to do so on a normal day. Agencies wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other if they AT&T services because you can’t dial 911 from one agency to the next, it doesn’t work that way.
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
Did you actually dial 911? Because if you tried dialing 911 and it didn’t go through, that’s a problem. ALL phones must be able to dial 911, even without service. If the phone can hit a tower, it can call 911.
From what I have read, I suspect that you might live in an area that took so long to get 2G that 3G essentially leapfrogged it for you. Emergency services run on 2G a lot of the time, and I don’t think any reports of 2G service being out.
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.
