Earlier this week, the FCC put out a report on the fact that AT&T had a massive outage back in February. And that report basically says that said outage was not only bad, it was worse than anyone thought.
“All voice and 5G data services for AT&T wireless customers were unavailable, affecting more than 125 million devices, blocking more than 92 million voice calls, and preventing more than 25,000 calls to 911 call centers,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in its report.
The 911 failures are the biggest problem here for reasons that are easy to understand. There’s nothing worse than trying to reach 911 in an emergency and being unable to get through. The FCC report does show that AT&T attempted to restore FirstNet (First Responder Network Authority) first before residential and commercial AT&T users, which sounds like the correct way to go about it.
However, the FCC also criticized AT&T for several failures on top of failing to test the implementation of the network change. The FCC pointed to a lack of oversight and controls to ensure test that processes were followed or that the processes themselves were insufficient. AT&T was also unprepared for the congestion caused by user devices attempting to reconnect to the network at the same time. AT&T’s network was insufficiently robust to mitigate the congestion.
Some of this sounds like what Canadians experienced a couple of years ago with the epic Rogers outage. A executive summary on that outage said that Rogers had a change management process that was suspect. Which sounds like AT&T’s lack of oversight and controls.
What is it with top telcos seemingly YOLO‘ing things, and having things go off the rails as a result?
John Gunn, CEO, Token
Just as the FDA ensures the food we eat doesn’t kill us, and the FAA ensures we have safe air travel, we need a regulatory agency to implement broad and stringent regulations to ensure the reliability and continuity of the digital services that are inextricably integrated into almost every aspect of our lives. No one should be a fan of additional regulation, but clearly, we are failing without it.
Mr. Gunn is right. Telcos need to be held to a higher standard and completely accountable for stuff like this. And that’s on both sides of the border. Perhaps lawmakers will do something and ensure that YOLO’ing anything has consequences.
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This entry was posted on July 25, 2024 at 8:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags AT&T. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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February’s AT&T Outage Was Worse Than Anyone Thought Says The FCC
Earlier this week, the FCC put out a report on the fact that AT&T had a massive outage back in February. And that report basically says that said outage was not only bad, it was worse than anyone thought.
“All voice and 5G data services for AT&T wireless customers were unavailable, affecting more than 125 million devices, blocking more than 92 million voice calls, and preventing more than 25,000 calls to 911 call centers,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in its report.
The 911 failures are the biggest problem here for reasons that are easy to understand. There’s nothing worse than trying to reach 911 in an emergency and being unable to get through. The FCC report does show that AT&T attempted to restore FirstNet (First Responder Network Authority) first before residential and commercial AT&T users, which sounds like the correct way to go about it.
However, the FCC also criticized AT&T for several failures on top of failing to test the implementation of the network change. The FCC pointed to a lack of oversight and controls to ensure test that processes were followed or that the processes themselves were insufficient. AT&T was also unprepared for the congestion caused by user devices attempting to reconnect to the network at the same time. AT&T’s network was insufficiently robust to mitigate the congestion.
Some of this sounds like what Canadians experienced a couple of years ago with the epic Rogers outage. A executive summary on that outage said that Rogers had a change management process that was suspect. Which sounds like AT&T’s lack of oversight and controls.
What is it with top telcos seemingly YOLO‘ing things, and having things go off the rails as a result?
John Gunn, CEO, Token
Just as the FDA ensures the food we eat doesn’t kill us, and the FAA ensures we have safe air travel, we need a regulatory agency to implement broad and stringent regulations to ensure the reliability and continuity of the digital services that are inextricably integrated into almost every aspect of our lives. No one should be a fan of additional regulation, but clearly, we are failing without it.
Mr. Gunn is right. Telcos need to be held to a higher standard and completely accountable for stuff like this. And that’s on both sides of the border. Perhaps lawmakers will do something and ensure that YOLO’ing anything has consequences.
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This entry was posted on July 25, 2024 at 8:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags AT&T. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.