AT&T Service Outages Hit The Midwest Friday

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes WGN: Customers using AT&T for phone and Internet reported widespread outages across Chicago and the Midwest Friday starting around 3 p.m. and going into the evening, according to the website DownDetector. In addition to Chicago, customers in St. Louis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati also reported issues like receiving a "Call Failed" message or a recording when they tried to make phone calls, or Internet simply not working. Outages in the Chicago area seem to have peaked around 8 p.m. The number of people registering issues on the website Outage Report seems to have peaked around that time as well.
The outage "has been repaired," reported an Indiana TV station early Saturday morning. Anyone else having connectivity issues? Share your stories in the comments.

World Series?

[seven of five]

Cubs home for World Series... everybody tuning in... wouldn't be surprised if ATT choked on traffic.

Re:

[fahrbot-bot]

Cubs home for World Series... everybody tuning in... wouldn't be surprised if ATT choked on traffic.

Then, everyone went over their allotment of "unlimited data" and AT&T throttled back their bandwidth.

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[rfengr]

From western Appalachian front, westward to: Mississippi River Crossing of Oregon and Santa Fe trail in KC Fort Leavenworth in eastern KS 98th meridian in central KS I suppose it's up for contention, and varied with time.

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[ITRambo]

Your ignorance is quite substantial.

Unsurprising

[Zak3056]

Legacy telco does not seem to be able to build bulletproof networks anymore.

Telephony is the original give nines application. In the past, and outage like this would probably have resulted in congressional hearings, but there have been numerous wide area outages from AT&T and other baby bells over the last few years, and the frequency of these outages just seems to get higher as years go on.

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[grumling]

When the goal is to deliver 4KHz worth of audio that hasn't changed at all over the last 100 years, It's pretty easy to get to 99.99% up time. Note that 99.999% uptime was only for SONET level circuits. When the product is narrowly defined by you, you get the ability to define what reliable service is. Helps to have the ability to raise rates every few years even when your operating costs drop. Also helps to control the central office upgrade cycle. That way you can make damn sure that switch's software is

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[Waffle Iron]

I doubt that they ever got even 99.99% uptime for end users. I distinctly remember occasionally getting "fast busy" signals when I tried to make calls (major metro area in the 70s), and it these downtimes almost certainly happened more than 52 minutes per year. Maybe the circuits were just overloaded, but my phone was still useless while it happened.

They very well may have had *less* uptime than a decent ISP has now. The main difference is that with almost constant use of the internet, you're more likely to

Centurylink having issues as well

[Zibodiz]

I have no idea if it's related or not, but Centurylink's email servers were down yesterday; customers were unable to check for messages via POP3, and inbound messages would be bounced as undeliverable with unreachable servers. Not sure if it's related, or just sympathy pains.

Sigh

[ThatsNotPudding]

You know the Midwest, that vast swathe of the United States EAST of the Mississippi.

It's like the Louisiana Purchase never happened.