AT&T’s botched network update caused yesterday’s major wireless outage
arstechnica.com
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AT&T blamed itself for "incorrect process used as we were expanding our network."
@MacAttak8@lemmy.world
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I did not have SOS service on my phone for about 6 hours yesterday. So you are incorrect in that all people were able to contact emergency services. ATT, Upper Midwest

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.

@MacAttak8@lemmy.world
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Correct. I had to connect to WiFi to use ATT calls over WiFi to call the non emergency number to be transferred to my needed emergency services. My local news station put out an announcement about ATT customers not being able to contact local 911 operators. May have had something to do with my county specifically. Still, a major issues.

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

@ji17br@lemmy.ml
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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.

@ji17br@lemmy.ml
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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.

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.

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