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Communications United States Verizon

FCC Says It is Investigating CenturyLink 911 Outage 143

Posted by msmash from the outage-reports dept.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said on Friday the agency had launched an investigation into a nationwide CenturyLink outage that has affected 911 service for consumers across the country. In a statement, he said [PDF]: "When an emergency strikes, it's critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help. The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling. I've directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to immediately launch an investigation into the cause and impact of this outage. This inquiry will include an examination of the effect that CenturyLink's outage appears to have had on other providers' 911 services. I have also spoken with CenturyLink to underscore the urgency of restoring service immediately. We will continue to monitor this situation closely to ensure that consumers' access to 911 is restored as quickly as possible." The outage, which lasted all day Thursday and is still ongoing in certain states, knocked out 911 emergency call services in parts of western Washington state. News outlet KOMO reported that some CenturyLink customers reported receiving busy signals when dialing 911. Other areas of the country also experiencing 911 outages included parts of Missouri, Idaho and Arizona. Some ATM machines weren't working in Idaho and Montana. And additionally, Verizon said it had service interruptions in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and parts of Montana as a result of issues with CenturyLink.
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FCC Says It is Investigating CenturyLink 911 Outage More

FCC Says It is Investigating CenturyLink 911 Outage

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  • Thursday? (Score:5, Informative)

    by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:19AM (#57870882)
    Ummm...it's still out for certain cell phone carriers here in Wisconsin.
    • Why are you not heading for your nearest bank? Woohoo CRIME SPREE TIME!

      • Re: Thursday? (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Because despite the liberal narrative, most people in America still own guns and will stop you if the cops are available.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Holi ( 250190 )
          That is utter bullshit. Gun ownership in America is about 30%. And most American's wouldn't stop to help a person who tripped and fell, let alone try and stop a crime.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Why are you not heading for your nearest bank? Woohoo CRIME SPREE TIME!

        There are still police patrolling the streets that don't rely on phones to communicate. And if a suitably equipped civillian happens to notice there's a bank robbery in progress and phones are down, they can still radio in on the police dispatcher to call for help, only under such extreme circumstances, of course.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Holi ( 250190 )
          Funny thing. More and more police forces are informally relying on cell services.

  • Not a problem (Score:5, Funny)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:21AM (#57870900) Journal
    I think that all reasonable friends of free enterprise can agree that this was merely some 911 prioritization; which is both a celebration of the first amendment rights of CenturyLink and will assuredly encourage further investment.

  • "CONSUMERS"????
    I thiught 911 was emergency service number for those in immediate need of assistance? What "customers"?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      911 centers need phone service, these call centers are customers of CentruryLink. Also, the outage is affecting normal customers too, such as phone and DSL. I'm on CenturyLink Fiber near Seattle. I've yet to lose connectivity, but BGP routing is taking totally fucked routes with high latency. So while I have "connectivity", accessing some web sites is either slow as balls, or downright impossible.

      • So THEY are the customers, OK. And only of CebturyLink, noone else? Shouldn't they be customers of all providers, or at least as many as possible?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dissy ( 172727 )

          And only of CebturyLink, noone else? Shouldn't they be customers of all providers, or at least as many as possible?

          In some areas being a customer of centurylink *IS* being a customer of all phone providers, which is as many as is possible.

  • Why does 911 not have redundant ISPs? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sometimes ISPs have outages, seems like 911 centers should be using redundant services.

    • Re: Why does 911 not have redundant ISPs? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They do. But the redundant paths also may traverse a CL impacted circuit. CL recently bought Level 3 which had tons of backbone fiber too.

    • In most of the places where 911 was taken offline, the 911 centers are already utilizing every single provider available. All 1 of them.

  • centurylink (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    is literally run by swamp stompers educated by louisana's fine public education system. it should surprise no one if and when their services aren't functioning. it should surprise no one when their billing is fucked up, or when service or appointments are missed, when services installed don't match a work order, etc, etc. they may be smaller than the other products of the telco consolidation era, but they're at least verizon's or at&t's equal when it comes to incompetence and quality of service and supp

  • This is what Ajit asked for... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:27AM (#57870948) Homepage Journal

    They just decided to make 911 the lowest priority on their network until the government pays more money to put them in the fast lane. :-P

  • In the Olden Days (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:32AM (#57870984)

    Telephones would always work. The central stations had battery backups, etc., and there was just a wire and some relay contacts connecting you to another phone. Today, we have fancy VOIP that doesn't work.

    • Telephones would always work.

      Umm, no. The telephone didn't work during Camille, for instance.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Umm, no. The telephone didn't work during Camille, for instance.

        Your individual service was down, perhaps, b/c you had a pole down, but most phones would be still working for local service.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In the Olden Days, Telephones would always work.

      Bullshit. Anyone old enough (and sober enough) to remember the 1980's is very familiar with the "All Circuits Busy" message especially during peak use times and during holidays. Constant outages during storms. Long distance calls failing because trunks were full. Local calls failing because of hardware failures in a local PoP.

      This is not a "VOIP" issue. It's a transport issue, and I'd go into more detail about why you're wrong but you're obviously too biased or stupid to comprehend any of it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        to remember the 1980's is very familiar with the "All Circuits Busy" message especially during peak use times and during holidays.

        Olden Phones were Local Only, and that was highly reliable. You're talking about Long Distance Service and Inter-Carrier services, which were extra paid add-ons, that were less so....
        Of course, because trunk capacity was limited, you may have had to wait for the chance at a time to call out on the Long-Distance/Cross-Provider exchange trunk.

      • "All circuits busy" is a network overload, not a network failure. Only a fraction of the phones out there will be in use at any given time, so it's wasteful (costs money) to maintain more calling circuits than are likely to be used simultaneously. The vast majority of the time this works and everyone who wants to make a call gets a free circuit. But occasionally when some big shared experience happens (9/11, OJ fleeing police, Challenger explosion, etc), everyone does try to use their phone at the same tim

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Sorry but horseshit. Telephones have always had outages. The difference is back then you didn't notice it straight away because your Facebook stopped working.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        I was on dial up until last year, noticed every phone outage pretty quick. Always copper thieves that took it out and they're stupid enough that they'll probably cut the new fiber going to the new cell tower which will have the same affect, no phone, no cell and no internet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      In the old days the US gov and mil had to care about a working POTS service. It was the only way to get another shift of skilled workers to the gov, chemical plant, nuclear plant, power plant, hospital, police.
      So the design was good and the service worked to important and skilled people who had another service installed for "work".
      At the larger telco centres, staff "worked" in shifts to ensure someone responsible with skills was at work 24/7.
      Villages, towns and cities all over the USA had advanced and w
    • Interestingly enough, during Sandy, we lost power for 11 days (so no wire based VOIP) but never lost cell phone service. The closest tower went down but the next closest gave me 2-3 bars. Presumably it too had battery backup since I don't think anywhere in the range of a tower serving a high-density area like this had power. Never took more than 3 tries to get a call through the busy network (first try half the time).
      And in a shocking display, on day 3 Verizon rolled a couple trucks into our town just to
    • One assumes you mean the early to mid1900s, because telephone systems have been computer controlled since 1ess was deployed in 1965.
  • To have your local police, fire, and emergency service numbers someplace instead of calling 911. I called 911 the other night on people fighting in the street, they just transferred me to the city police. Shoot, I could have just called them straight up.

    • People fighting on the street is an emergency? Maybe you don't understand that the non-emergency numbers should ALWAYS be used for non-emergencies.

      • This was at 4am in the morning in an apartment complex. While this was occurring, other neighbors started yelling at them to shut the fuck up they were sleeping. You don't think that innocents would get dragged into a fight isn't an emergency? That was my concern, and that was why I called the police.

      • Re:And here is a reason (Score:5, Insightful)

        by eth1 ( 94901 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @01:19PM (#57871672)

        People fighting on the street is an emergency? Maybe you don't understand that the non-emergency numbers should ALWAYS be used for non-emergencies.

        You should use 911 for any in-progress situation. It's the dispatchers' job to prioritize, not yours. The non-emergency number should be use for calling in reports after the fact (i.e. "someone stole my bike sometime last night"), or nuisances like noise complaints (even this one is debatable). This almost verbatim from our PD's public information officer.

        "Just a fight" is always one hit away from someone being seriously injured or killed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Fighting in the street is an emergency. It is a violent crime in progress, and there are people in immediate danger of serious physical injury or possible death, so yes, 911 should be dialed if people are fighting in the street.

      • Around here the local cops say to call 911 to contact them. I've called it a few times to deal with assholes and their barking dogs.

      • Yes, people fighting in the streets is exactly the kind of scenario where a 911 call would be appropriate. I guess nobody explained this to you but sometimes innocent bystanders die as a result of such crimes. One assumes you would agree that a situation where there is a distinct possibility someone might die is an emergency, I mean, unless you are one of the most stupid motherfuckers on the planet.
  • Did someone decide to deploy a country wide change to the SDN configuration?

  • Improper Centralization of Services (Score:5, Informative)

    by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:39AM (#57871030)

    911 is a service that Has to Work --- A local outage of 911 in one market might be explainable as multiple circuit or equipment failures, but having a national outage of 911 is unacceptable.

    Having a "national outage of 911" means that the system/communications paths providing City X's 911 service have been consolidated or centralized in - order to cut costs or save money by having a smaller number of shared equipment (or single point of failure) required for City Y and City Z's 911 service to function ---- Contrary to a Telecommunication provider's obligation to provide reliable 911 service, which includes protecting customer access to the local 911 PSAP against failures of equipment that aren't in the same region as the PSAP.

    • There *were* national outages of Internet and voice, but the 911 outages were much more limited (mainly western Washington)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        There *were* national outages of Internet and voice, but the 911 outages were much more limited

        National outage of voice through CL's network is in the same category, since if voice is down -- subscribers cannot dial 911.
        If CenturyLink cannot handle ensuring that local voice service is not interrupted by conditions existing outside the local region, then they should be broken up into a larger number of small providers, that way each small provider can provide a local voice service that will not routin

        • Not *all* voice was down. If you had traditional TDM services (or if you used your cellphone), you could (most likely) still make voice calls, and thus get to 911 (except for western WA). From what I understand the outage was data-network related (read Internet). Services that rode the data network were affected. Most customers of telco's these days ask for VoIP-type services (packetized voice). That requires that both the voice and data run on the same network. And that makes a single outage doubly dangero

      • The outages were software upgrades from... (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Everything the reddit threads were saying. They listed them as starting at 1:45am. I assume eastern time, since the first person to drop off on me as a result was at 00:50 pacific with their second and final dropoff at 01:37am.

        If this was a broadcast storm caused by a failed software upgrade, as was described, then it was affecting and too down all systems that had the upgrade pushed to them. If all their management access was done on insufficient bandwidth links that also doubled as the routing table trunk

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )
        Massachusetts and Rhode Island have been getting notices all day.

  • Emergency Alert on North Western Oregon 911 Down (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DallasTruaxxx ( 4880195 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:48AM (#57871084)
    There was an emergency alert pushed out to cell phones on northwestern oregon saying 911 services were down. The message provided another number to call in case of emergency.
  • This is a test of the internet kill switch system. Do not panic. This is only a test.
  • again, our "system"s show all the signs of brittle fragility, a hacker's delight.
  • The company that was so completely awful it had to change its name from Qwest.
  • I'm sure a full investigation will be conducted, and they'll identify deficiencies in the CenturyLink infrastructure that must be immediately fixed through a government subsidy.

  • I woke up to a text alert warning me that 911 service was down and to call direct local numbers for police and fire.

  • If they are going to use it for 911 service, doesn't that make it a de factor common carrier service? Or, alternately, why the hell does a life-critical service depend on a private commercial operator, and apparently with *no redundancy*.

          The 911 aspect of it seems like more a failure of the people in charge of setting up the 911 service (and putting easily and predictably failure-prone elements into it) than is of Centurylink. Just seems irresponsible.

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