BY KYLE ANDREW BROWN
LOUISVILLE, August 5 – Just one day after Ma Bell’s big announcement promoting the All In One bundle AT&T hardware outages in the Southeast crippled millions of cellular cell phones at mid-afternoon raising concerns for the nation’s terrorism preparedness.
Kentucky’s Courier-Journal Tech Journo Matthew Glowicki reported that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon customers were affected around 3 p.m.
The Southeast’s regional telecommunications interconnectivity is highlighted by www.downdetector.com. The Tennessean Tech Journo Jordan Bouiucaptured it’s display for the AT&T hardware outage.
Cellular customers in Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and Indiana were affected by the AT&T hardware outages.
The service disruptions are all about what AT&T spokeswoman Cathy Lewandowski says is a hardware problem. So nobody was out climbing poles splicing together wires in the middle of the night.
Cathy checked with the girls in the Tech Department and they say everything was operational at 9 p.m.
Throughout the afternoon and early evening the nation’s four major cellular providers tweeted hopeful assurances their engineers were hard at work resolving the problem.
A mystery game of sorts was set in motion over at T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon on their Twitter customer care centers. While the providers sent out reassuring tweets that their engineers were hard at work restoring service, it turns out the companies were actually working the phones – via landline most likely – over to AT&T.
The way it works is none of the nation’s four major cellular providers that send out those monthly customer bills really want to put it out there that the nation’s communications infrastructure is a technological consortium of sorts.
In the Southeast region affected by the outages Ma Bell is the mystery partner operating the cellular backhaul.
From a national security stand point the Southeast’s telecommunications blackout raises terrorism preparedness concerns. The Department of Homeland Security has been spending billions of dollars to put in place emergency communications backup in the event of a major terrorism incident.
The way it works says Tech Journo Ina Fried over at re/code is that once a call is placed on a service provider’s cellular system regional landlines collect the data from cell phone towers. It then passes the data throughit’s backhaul transmission facilities.
Tuesday’s cellular outage was caused by hardware problems at AT&T’s Southeast Region backhaul facilities.
Thankfully, for the moment –
A&T hardware outages have been resolved on social media.