Technology

If you cut costs enough, including in personnel and testing, stupidity is caused by malice. Not saying that's exactly what happened here but we've all definitely seen the effects when corpos decide to lay off thousands and their capabilities suffer.

I think it was the same intern that accidentally told Hawaii it was about to be hit by an icbm

While I like that saying in the context of not knowing whether it is malice or stupidity, it does need the context of 'Unless you know there is malice..."

Malicious people do stupid things too.

I always included obliviousness in this as well. But one could argue that’s just another form of stupidity… 🤷

Do you think a public IT staffer would be immune to fuckups?

Yeah I definitely saw the solar flares article.

This living person trusts the living flares we're the cause, as they never rejected my coupons.

Except for the guy that did this.

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

I do know that FirstNet was impacted. The tablets in our fire apparatus couldn’t connect which is kind of a pain in the neck because we use that to navigate, locate fire hydrants and view their flow capabilities and whether they’re out of service, store maintenance phone numbers, view building blueprints and material safety data sheets, view responding apparatus and locations, identify helicopter landing sites, etc.

Like the job will still get done but it does throw a wrench in our ability to coordinate larger responses.

I was impacted and it sucked. Having no cell service for 8-9 hours is not fun. Can't make or receive calls or texts, every app that requires or uses an internet connection (like Waze) was impacted. Whole Waze worked with directions using offline maps and GPS, you don't fet stuff like traffic conditions and rerouting.

But when you only have a cell phone and limited wifi resources at the office, it's a major pain in the butt. And I didn't report so that 70k could've been a conservative number of people that reported.

Our company phones were affected (both cellular and our ability to phone out or take external calls on our traditional phones). For us, the outage started at 4am (edit: this is just when my small department noticed, we're not IT), could be that not everyone noticed.

Yeah, but this is lemmy so.. the outrage is very real. Even for most of the people complaining about it that don’t even have AT&T.

Some of the affected users were other systems, like Duo, which then caused downstream outages of even more thousands. That's why it's being reported that way.

I was affected. Haven't bothered to report since I wasn't seriously bothered. Might be different if I'd lost business or couldn't contact family

Normally, the odd times are because someone can't work the weekend, which is crazy to me since I am someone who accepts all the worst go live times...

Although the more I think about it, would there really have been a fantastic day or time? Even weekends suck because it affects everything so even then it would have sucked plus if it did bring down companies those people are now doing work on the weekends as well. Idk if I disagree with a late time smack in the middle of the week date for this the more I think about it.

The outage was big enough that the Federal Communications Commission said its Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau was actively investigating.

No single company should be big enough to cause that kind of problem.