The '22 Rogers outage, hah. As I recall it didn't affect me at all since I was at home and work in Vancouver all day… but it was a great excuse for not responding to workplace on-call messages which I got in the evening

> Well, their towers were sorta up (as they couldn’t remotely turn them off since the network was down), so if you had a Rogers SIM, a call to 9-1-1 wouldn’t failover to other networks because the device made just enough of a handshake to try and fail on the Rogers network. A flaw in GSM I reckon.

Didn't know that part, amazing.

It sounds kind of like connecting to a WiFi access point which has a broken/non-working uplink to the Internet. Modern smartphones pretty much automatically detect and avoid such APs, and indeed the whole SSID if they need to, but it sounds like the stuck-in-1985 2G baseband layer has no equivalent connectivity check.