this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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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.
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.
If that's true, that's wack. There's no reason that the one phone company's service issue should have affected your phone's ability to call 911. Towers aren't company specific so it doesn't make sense that there would be interference 🤔 someone fucked up
It's not always about towers and signal.
There's call routes and service monitoring involved.
Call routing still has to happen to get you to 911. Service monitoring still happens to try directing your 911 call to another 911 dispatch center. If those two functions are broke, you get nothing no matter what.
Doesn’t That tower still need to route the call to 911? And if that routing is broken the call wouldn’t go through…I think?
Towers aren't specific to any single phone company, if you stop paying for your phone service entirely, you can still dial 911. It just hits off the nearest tower.
I was under the impression that a company (AT&T) owns the tower, and they can lease out connections from that tower to other providers. They are also required by law to route 911 calls for free, but I can see a scenario if they botched the routing where 911 would not be accessible from that tower.
They don't always own the tower. Like everything in America, another company fronts the cost, att pays them for tower use. And the other carriers. It's a business model.
That makes sense. I wonder how many AT&T towers were affected. To my knowledge, no one in my area on the east coast was affected if they tried calling 911, just standard numbers.