E.g., Cloudflare, Meta (who in doing so also locked themselves out of the building), and didn't some bumbling major Canadian telco knock themselves offline for like a week not too long ago?
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-cyberat...
These network topologies are incredibly complex and edges you think wouldn't exist have ways of suddenly appearing when things go awry.
> In a letter to the CRTC, Rogers stated that the deletion of a routing filter on its distribution routers caused all possible routes to the internet to pass through the routers, exceeding the capacity of the routers on its core network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
I took my kids swimming that day and the pool couldn't take our money since the payment terminal was on the Rogers cellular network, so it was a free family swim.
Cyberattack scenarios pretty much never make sense in case of complete outages; if you have the access required to cause such an outage it’s always more profitable to keep this access and use it for covert spying/targeted attacks or save it for later than to burn it by causing a massive, visible problem.
Note the tiny fraction of people reporting for ATT & TMO compared to Verizon on DownDetector: https://downdetector.com/
(You have to click the links to see actual magnitude because the graphs are scaled to show relative outage within a given service -- order of 150k for Verizon vs 1.5k for the others.)
Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.
It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from thousands of individuals.
You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?
Also things break. Vulnerabilities come along that need to be carefully patched and deployed. Tools and packages get depreciated. Updates can be done to save compute, and money. Things don't just hum along with zero intervention by no one for years and years.
I realize your point, but its fair to say maintaining a nationwide physical wireless infrastructure may not be the same as hosting tweets, particularly when outages strike.
When Twitter did, its CEO may have slept at the office for weeks to make sure problems were resolved.
On the other hand, the Verizon CEO may be shopping for a new boat
Many think Twitter has imploded, though it's online.
> You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?
It's possible to be understaffed or appropriately staffed. Anything is possible!
I can't even begin to imagine what those 100k people actually do. For starters, none of the telcos actually develop their own equipment - they buy pre-made from vendors like Ericsson. Often that includes ongoing maintenance too. The only "engineering" is building the back-office and customer-facing UIs, and even that is often outsourced (as a rule of thumb, if something can be outsourced, telcos will do it: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/).
Customer service might be part of that number (assuming that too isn't outsourced), but even then 100k feels extreme.
10k is ok although leaning on the more bloated side. But 100k?
I'm in a similar boat to you in wanting a LoRa mesh. I tried out MeshCore on the LilyGo T-Deck+ hoping it would be a device I could hand out to family members, but I found the hardware and software disappointing.[0] But I'm weirdly tempted to try the LilyGo Pager.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/#testing-th...
The main downside is that you have different numbers for each eSIM, but that doesn't really affect me because I use Google Voice for SMS.
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/THtvkD...
But yeah I probably should have clarified that Google Voice has been a pretty terrible UX and quality overall for years. I really need to just bite the bullet and port my number out.
I use them for my work phone, but there are a few things keeping me from switching away from T-Mobile for my personal lines (and I'd VERY MUCH like to switch):
- I have a family plan wherein I pay something like $254/mo for seven voice/data lines, two smartwatch lines and two tablet data lines. The phone lines all have unlimited data at full speed.
- T-Satellite just launched (wherein your phone uses Starlink when terrestrial towers aren't available). I'm not in this situation often but it can be useful.
- My plan provides free Wi-Fi on United. I fly a lot and use this benefit all of the time. Losing it would negate the savings I'd rack up from switching to US Mobile.
I was previously on Google Fi, and MVNO roaming is bloody fantastic - I always had reception.
As I've said elsewhere, never underestimate Verizon's incompetence. A couple years ago they shut down vtext service which also happened to host their UAprof's for most Android phones. Without a working link to these descriptors, those devices would download any MMS (pre-RCS picture messages) in compatibility mode at the lowest resolution.
https://downdetector.com/ shows verizon, tmobile, and att. BUT if you look at the magnitude of the outages for tmobile and att vs verizon it's fractions of a percent. Likely those people with tmobile and att reporting when they have trouble communicating with verizon customers.
(Note, you have to click on the providers to see absolute magnitude -- the graphs are scaled to show relative outage over time within a given provider; order of 150k verizon vs 1.5k others)
Looking at the replies some of the people who are more worried about the outage seem to be the OF models
Not judging or trying to make a point. Just find it interesting the ways things are interconnected
I noticed that a little while ago too. Very bad UI. Tempted to post in r/dataisugly.
"Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today's service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible."
As someone responsible my whole career for uptime and network response, I really feel for the engineers, at the same time hoping my service comes back up soon. SOS
I did manage to roam onto an international network on the boarder near me in New York/Canada, so some bits of the core seem functional for authentication.
When I roam internationally I appear to be on Telus's 3G network (no LTE) for data and voice is falling even further back it looks like.
I have a Moto. Updates are explicitly disabled. A lot of stuff has been deactivated via ADB. While Moto does try to force sneak updates against my settings and will, on occasion, I just so happened to grab my phone today and at approximately the very moment of the outage, noticed an unsolicited Moto update, which I cancelled. But at that moment, cellular was or went down (~1400) and remained so until ~2200.
Was this a coincidence, or could something much more interesting have happened, eg a serious security breach? An interesting coincidence, for me. I spent the day convinced that Moto sent a kill sig wanting me to buy a new phone.
In my wild imagination, I vaguely surmised something involving compromise. I'm not sure what you're implying though, probably something spiteful.
Ironically I was planning to port my parents from Verizon to US Mobile to save them some money since they aren't financing any devices (there's a sale from them that ends today) and I've just done that on the first line and I now have service on that line with Verizon, where the remaining Verizon postpaid is still dead.
I assume state on state cyber attacks are commonplace but get minimized to avoid public fear.. perhaps this will be the first notable one.
Made worse by the fact Estonia is a more networked society than, for example, the US.
https://downdetector.com/status/t-mobile/ ~ 1,600
https://downdetector.com/status/att/ ~ 1,500
https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/ ~ peaked at ~169k, dropped to 67k
It came up for around 5-10 minutes at 15:00 EST, but is currently still down.
Something like a routing configuration, BGP failure, or underlying network misconfiguration would cause seemingly bizarre results with some phones working and some not with no obvious correlation. Compare Access Point Names under Mobile Settings on android, and whatever the equivalent is on iPhones, and check things like whether 5G allowed and data roaming is enabled.
If it's a cyber attack of some sort, then there's all sorts of different attack vectors that would cause these outcomes.
Edit to say: my Verizon FioS and cell service are both working fine, no noticeable interruption at any point today.
Second edit to say: never mind, downdetector's home page normalizes report spikes so 1k and 100k both look identical.
But hers came back on when she paid her bill, oops! So...
I went to their website, which said "You have a local outage! Click here to know more...". I clicked there, and it said "There are no outages in your area." OK, so we've established that Verizon's website doesn't know shit.
I started troubleshooting with a tech support person ("I am in ... New... Jersey" - sure you are...), and discovered my optical interface whatsit was hanging by its cables in my basement, mysteriously knocked off its wall bolts. This happened sometime in the last 10 days, so it's a smoking gun.
I called for a repairman, because obviously the fall damaged the fiber alignment...
... except it didn't. The tree limb across the street that broke the cable coming into my house did cause a problem.
So... Verizon outages are complicated, and despite all their technical know-how, they don't really know shit.
Some server in NJ is down
BART Defends Cutting Off Cell Service In Subway
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/16/139664637/bart-defends-cuttin...
And will happen again.
It's a citizen-run mesh network that allows text communication. It's not perfect and not 100% reliable (signal and hops limit delivery guarantees) but it's better than 0 ways to communicate in this kind of event!
