Can you hear me now?

 Yesterday morning (Thursday, February 22, 2024) the unthinkable happened: Cell service quit working.  No texting, no Internet, no email, no various social media sites, no nothing.  The various providers just shut down.

I'm going to pontificate about this for a little while.  Read and enjoy as you like.

I grew up in Sylvania Township, Ohio.  In the mid-1950s we lost power at around nine at night, maybe earlier.  I was about five years old then, so my memory of the details isn't all that clear, as the importance of events and conditions doesn't happen until you're much older.  However, we did lose power, and that led to my father getting the kerosene lantern lit, looking up the phone number for the electric company, and calling them via our plain old telephone service (POTS) phone.  His reaction was not what anyone expected.

Dad was told by some clerical lady (they were all women back then) that no one knew just when power would be restored, and that there were entire cities without lights.  Now consider, WWII ended with a bang in 1945, and twelve or so years later we, the victors, suffer a nationwide power failure.  The reaction was to load up the shotgun and keep listening to the radio, because either the Chinese or the USSR had just pulled a sneak attack and may have landed ground pounders on the east coast.  Or the west coast, or maybe they're coming out of the north, through Canada.

None of that happened - but it could have, and the adult population had some vivid memories of War 2.  So what did happen?  No one ever said, and hunting through the Internet, I can't find any reference to it.  I discovered a massive outage in 1965 caused by a poor design, high demand, and people.  But that's all, and I'm seventy - plus years old, and I wonder about that missing bit of history.

Yesterday a significant number of people in the U.S. lost cell phone service, and since few folks have POTS these days, an outage is significant.  The number two question, naturally enough, is some variant on What happened!?  AT&T tells us, via some local talking head...

AT&T Reveals Cause of Nationwide Cellphone Outage

AT&T blamed the incident on an error in coding, without elaborating.

“Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack,” the Dallas-based company said.

Applying Ockham's razor, this is probably what happened.  AT&T employs scum-sucking contractors in their computer programming division due to labor costs.  Why pay an experienced coder six figures a year when you can get some India coder for a fraction of the cost?  Well, mainly because you don't want a massive failure like the one we just had, and that's just for openers.

I used to write code for a living, and I vividly remember one assignment I had in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  My immediate supervisor hired some genius who decided he didn't like the way the base classes were written, and so pulled a massive re-write over the weekend.  He put his efforts into production on Sunday, around eleven at night.  First thing Monday morning the entire system blew chunks, and this was the cornerstone system of the business.  Discovering what he'd done, coding was suspended, a restore took place, the whole thing was recompiled and (thank the powers that be) ran.  The contractor in question managed to escape just ahead of a crew that wanted him to be the guest of honor at a neck tie party.

Which is why I think that it's very likely some programmer, under a lot of pressure to get the job done early, FUBAR.  He'll get fired, as will his boss and maybe the grand-boss as well.  Equally incompetent people will be hired at a lower cost, and that will be that.

But what if I'm wrong?

What if this was a real cyber attack.  Does anyone think AT&T or any other company would state as much, publicly?  If they did, where would the news appear?  Commercial media isn't any good at reporting the real story, and while underground sites might carry this news, the story wouldn't be around all that long.

That's where I'm leaving it.  Most likely this was a coding error, and it's less likely that this was an attack on our communications system.  My other guess is that we'll never know.

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.