AT&T Crashed here and took the 911 system down with it

Image by F. Muhammad from Pixabay
@DWDavis (25797)
United States
July 27, 2023 12:31pm CST
According to reports, the AT&T Network in our area started failing around 8:40 this morning and took the county 911 system down with it. The outage spread and reached my area about 30 minutes before noon. By a weird coincidence, my phone, which is on the Verison network, decided to stop sending and receiving texts at that same moment. This leads me to think that AT&T and Verizon share towers around these parts. It all appears to be up and running again now. The odd thing is that my AT&T modem, somewhere in the midst of all this, received an update that changed the ID of our home network as well as the security key. Luckily, I was able to access my AT&T account online and figure out how to get all our devices on the "new" network. Having the AT&T network not working was inconvenient, but I was able to fall back on my Verizon JetPak and still get online. Why it worked, when my phone wouldn't, is a question far above my paygrade. I'm thankful it did. Do you feel cast adrift when your internet service has an outage?
10 people like this
9 responses
Eva James
@wolfgirl569 (135818)
• Marion, Ohio
27 Jul 23
It can mess up my day sometimes
1 person likes this
DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
@wolfgirl569 There was a mini-meltdown today when we realized the wireless printers weren't on the new network AT&T so kindly surprised us with. I wrote about that elsewhere.
1 person likes this
DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
I'm glad it was yesterday and not today. K is working remotely today. She would have melted down over losing connectivity.
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Eva James
@wolfgirl569 (135818)
• Marion, Ohio
28 Jul 23
@DWDavis That would be understandable
1 person likes this
LindaOH
@LindaOHio (222534)
• United States
27 Jul 23
Yes because I get behind. I have certain things that I do every day, including about 3 hours on MyLot. Enjoy your day.
1 person likes this
DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
It threw my whole afternoon out of whack.
1 person likes this
DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
@LindaOHio Now that I got the printers back on the network, everything is going smoothly.
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LindaOH
@LindaOHio (222534)
• United States
28 Jul 23
@DWDavis Don't you hate that? I hope everything is AOK now.
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OceanTiara
@RebeccasFarm (91297)
• United States
28 Jul 23
No I just busy myself with other things.
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DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
I did use the time to take the dogs out for an extra romp in the yard. It was a short one due to the heat.
1 person likes this
DE
@DaddyEvil (174528)
• United States
27 Jul 23
The government told all the phone companies that they needed to share towers so there wasn't such a big mess around ten years or so ago. If one tower goes down, it usually takes all the networks with it for that given area. Your JetPak doesn't use as much bandwidth as your phone requires so was still operational. (You may have still been able to send texts if you had tried. Texts also use less bandwidth.)
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DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
I tried sending texts with no luck. Based on some later texts I received, a few folks attempted to text me during the outage with nothing reaching me.
1 person likes this
DE
@DaddyEvil (174528)
• United States
30 Jul 23
@DWDavis Then there was no signal for the phone system, at all. I'm glad the outage didn't last too long.
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Ron Rybs
@Ronrybs (21497)
• London, England
28 Jul 23
We had something similar with our 999 system here a couple of weeks back
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DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
It's an unsettling feeling knowing the emergency call line is out of order.
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DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
31 Jul 23
@Ronrybs It's good the non-emergency system continued working. I'm old enough to remember when the police, fire, and rescue squads all had different phone numbers and we were taught to memorize them all as kids.
Ron Rybs
@Ronrybs (21497)
• London, England
29 Jul 23
@DWDavis Whilst it was being repaired, they were able to use the non-emergency system as a back up
1 person likes this
Arunima Singh
@arunima25 (93194)
• Bangalore, India
27 Jul 23
Internet has become a basic necessity in today's time. It's annoying and inconvenient when there is a disruption in the service. I hope that the 911 service was not out for too long. That can be dangerous. Emergencies can't wait to be addressed later.
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DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
27 Jul 23
The message I received indicated that all our area 911 calls were being automatically routed to the next county and then back to emergency services here. Hopefully, there were few calls and no delays.
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Arunima Singh
@arunima25 (93194)
• Bangalore, India
31 Jul 23
@DWDavis Oh! I see.
1 person likes this
Ptrikha_2
@ptrikha_2 (49753)
• India
27 Jul 23
I am still in Work From Home mode for most of the weekdays. Yesterday, the Net was not working properly and at such times the work gets impacted.
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Kayla Tsukino
@kaylachan (84815)
• Daytona Beach, Florida
28 Jul 23
Most of the time it doesn't really bother me.
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DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
I think most people hardly give their internet/wifi service a second thought until it glitches at exactly the wrong moment.
Judy Evans
@JudyEv (382240)
• Rockingham, Australia
28 Jul 23
That would flummox me completely. I would have no idea what to do.
1 person likes this
DW Davis
@DWDavis (25797)
• United States
28 Jul 23
I wasn't sure what to do, so I dug out the original paperwork from when we first subscribed and went step-by-step until I found the instructions for looking up your network name and key in the event you lost them. That's when I discovered the change.
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