AT&T Outage Blocked 92 Million Calls, FCC Report Reveals

AT&T's February wireless outage disrupted over 92 million voice calls and hindered more than 25,000 attempts to reach emergency services, an FCC report said. The 12-hour nationwide incident affected approximately 125 million devices, including those of other providers using AT&T's network. Stemming from an equipment configuration error during a network change, the outage also impacted first responders' communications.

Remember time before it was a rude-goldberg machin

[MikeDataLink]

Remember when the internet was open and not run by two or three conglomerates? Remember when it was designed to survive a nuclear war? Remember when a damaged node would just re-route around and no one knew? The modern internet is simply a rude-goldberg machine. It's sad.

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[account_deleted]

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[MikeDataLink]

Wow. The point I made just flew over your head.

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[account_deleted]

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[dgatwood]

No, my point apparently went over yours. Without all the "Rube Goldberg"-esque garbage, the web would still be Usenet. HTML 1.0. Sure, web pages would load and run super-fast; with nothing but clean hand-written HTML code and practically zero interactivity (I'm not sure GETS and PUTS count).

If you want something more complicated than a BBS, be prepared for complexity far beyond your average BBS. Just sayin'. Ever look at a Jumbo Jet? There's a Rube Goldberg invention if ever there was one. You want something more advanced than the Wright Flyer, be prepared for something more complex than bailing wire, pool cues, spit and bubble gum (the components of an old-style 300-baud acoustic modem).

None of which has anything to do with the point that having a small number of companies control a huge amount of infrastructure is a recipe for mass outages.

Then again, apparently having a small number of companies install kernel extensions into a huge amount of infrastructure is also a recipe for mass outages, judging by last week, so we might just be screwed either way.

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[sjames]

The problem isn't the advances in the hardware, protocols, or the software. The problem is bean counters who count the pennies while ignoring the dollars.

I've seen routing issues that could have been fixed before they even happened with a 3 foot ethernet cable plugged between 2 unused ports. It wasn't done because the bean counters want to count every single bit that crosses that cable and bill for it obsessively (while the other guy does the same and it comes out a wash except for the accounting costs to b

V2

[antdude]

Where's our Internet v2? :P

FCC Should Mandate Domestic Roaming

[expresspotato]

I think the FCC should finally get around to mandating Domestic Roaming for this very reason. Cap it as 1-5 Mbps, and no more than 50% of a 12 month billing period... Also they should mandate that phones attempt other networks for 911 calls. I believe phones were still "registered" to AT&T infrastructure but it wouldn't connect the call.

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[account_deleted]

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It's okay

[mukundajohnson]

They gave me $5 for my inconvenience

Oh, no!

[kmoser]

Think of all the people who never got notified about the extended warranty on their vehicle!

92/125 ratio is interesting

[CycleMan]

If they lost 92 million calls across 125 million devices, does that mean the average impacted device placed 3/4 of a call during 12 hours? If that's the case, then at least 33 million of the devices were "impacted" but nobody noticed or cared. I think I'm missing something from the article. Can anyone help me out?

Spam calls...

[slipped_bit]

Considering about 91 million of those were probably spam calls, this doesn't seem like that big of a deal.