Power failure to blame for massive AT&T network outage
Yesterday we broke the news of a massive AT&T network outage that came at one of the worst possible times – right smack in the middle of Wal-Mart’s iPhone 3G launch. Users from various regions throughout the eastern United States were reporting communication interruptions ranging from dropped calls to the complete inability to send/receive any voice or data. According to a later report from Chicago’s Sun Times, the cause of the massive network trauma was a power outage originating in Bloomfield, Michigan. The explanation seems a bit curious however, as some users in affected areas were reporting that their service was working fine – the Sun Times even quoted a couple as saying that while driving together in the same car, the husband’s phone was completely dead while the wife had no service problems at all.
While the bulk of comments were from areas that would certainly be affected such as Michigan, Wisconsin Illinois and the surrounding areas, we also received plenty of reports from up and down the east coast. AT&T customers from as far north as Rochester, NY to as far south as Florida were commenting and sending emails about their inability to make data and/or voice connections. A spokeswoman from AT&T later stated that “virtually all service traffic” was back up and running around 9:00 pm local time, yet we were still getting reports of network troubles well beyond midnight. Whatever the case may be however, AT&T seems to be back in business this morning as reports of connection issues have slowed to a halt.
Best largest network you say? Thank Gawd you have wifi on your iphones, you need it.
always blaming someone else for their outages…
Made the switch to AT&T just for the iPhone, worst mistake ever. Constant dropped calls, slow 3g, sounds garbled, etc.. I’m stupid to pay 100 bucks a month and get shitty ass service. I really love my iPhone but AT&T sucks. My sister with verizon hardly ever has network issues. I’m paying the etc and switching to sprint or verizon.
haha ATT cust. service wasn’t even open yesterday either for people to call and bitch. I had a customer yesterday porting from ATT but only wanted to port 1 line at the time cuz they needed to find out contract end dates. The stores phones were out as well and as some just not picking up all together.
For the couple in the car together, one probably had a 3G phone and one had a 2G phone. For me, 3G data wouldn’t work, but 2G data worked fine.
Yea, it wasn’t a complete outage – my 2G data still worked but I couldn’t get calls through. EDGE must have been working, GSM not so much…
Yea I switched to AT&T for the iPhone also I like the phone but the service yesterday killed me you know how they have those commericials when the people couldn’t get those calls and their plans went wrong that’s how I felt LOL
AT&T sucks, plain and simple.
I had full bars and 3G but no data all the way down in Florida. How does a power outage in Michigan affect me in Florida? And how does a power outage only affect 3G? stoopid. I smell cover-up.
A service outage for 12 hours killed you? You’re switching from AT&T to Sprint?
Come on people… this is not the end of the world. I do understand you pay for service and your expect it to work but jumping carriers, paying the ETF, is it really worth it for a minor outage? $hit happens, no carrier is perfect.
Yet another reason to stick with T-Mobile. I never understood why AT&T’s Customer Service wasn’t 24 hours like with T-Mobile, but I guess when you suck that bad, you don’t want your CS representatives to undergo a constant barrage of bitching all hours of the day and night.
Yeah, so what’s their excuse for the crappy service and dropped calls the rest of the year? Whitout the iphone exclusivity AT&T would have about half the customers it has today. They should pray every night to Steve Jobs.
TedP – I smell Incompetence, possibly user incompetence.
who cares, its over and done. All carriers have issues and lie about what happened. They are all garbage in different ways, nothing different here.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration isn’t it? There’s no way there are ~25 million iPhone users in the United States, even when counting the 2G & 3G sales.
For what its worth, AT&T does have a huge footprint, so although it’s not always the best, if they’re the only ones there, then that’s what people will chose.
@Jeremiah, ..tmobile de might be open all night but there is an internal memo that requires you to shut down your brain from 12:01 am- 11:59 pm so that leaves 2 min to actually reach someone that works there that isn’t distracted by “drooling, pretty colors, boogers,” or nickjr.com on their comptuers. Aka tmo employees are TARDS.
from yahoo.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081229/ap_on_re_us/winter_weather
for those of you that do not think that there was a power outage…
and there is a bit of a trickle effect that happens durring an outage.
People should pray to Steve Jobs to fix the iPhone issues Jerry, not the network. My non iPhone smartphones work just fine on the AT&T network. No dropped calls, great data performance. It seems like most of the complaints come from iPhone users so I chalk it up to the hardware and not the network. Not this latest outage by the way just the crappy performance issues in general. Maybe Apple will get it right with the third generation.
My Diamond worked fine yesterday and I live close to Bloomfield Hills.
I live in Berkley, MI which is about 15 minutes from Bloomfield, MI and experienced phone problems. We had a massive wind storm topping 60 mph Saturday nite which caused a number of issues around the area. Anyways, my wife has 1st Gen iPhone and had no service from 8am until 7pm. I have a 3G phone which was working but no data until 3pm. For the most part, I could make calls all day.
Yesterday really sucked for AT&T, but it does kind of suck the rest of the year too.
It all depends on the market you live in.
Here in the Los Angeles market, we only have 5 MHz of dedicated 3G airwaves. That is chump change service for such a large market.
This means that regular v3xx users like me have to share the small 3G network with iPhone data hogs and that is why I keep losing my 3G signal in the middle of a call or data session.
This creates dropped calls and when you mix in the bad HR codec used on GSM, you get a recipe for frustration.
iPhone users are not the only AT&T customers who get bad service.
@ Gina D:
I also live in LA. I run into the same issues you run into with my Moto Phone and iPhone.
AT&T still charges users full price even when they skimp us on the 3G network and force us to use a degraded voice protocal just because they’re too cheap to enhance their network by building out more.
Can’t wait till my contract expires in May
att might have issues, but att and my nokia phones are heavenly. If I could get the e71 on sprint or verizon I would. If t-mobile had supported 3g, I would be there. My love for phones comes before my love for services. I can live with an outage every once in a while. I was watching football all day anyways.
AT&T has been f@%&in up lately, before this outage. I live in atlanta and have been with them for a year and all of a sudden I’m not getting service where I have been all year, all of a sudden I’m getting dropped calls, all of a sudden the phone will hang up
I’ve been a Cellular One / Cingular / AT&T customer for over 8 years now.
This is the second time in that period that I’ve had any issues like this. I don’t recall when the first time was, however it was short lived. This outage was the largest I’ve ever seen with a carrier. While I do agree that they need some more redundancy and better disaster recoery plans in place, I think that overall they do a pretty good job of keeping things going.
As for those dogging on the iPhone, I’m in Chicago and the only times I’ve had issues are in areas where other phones I’ve had have issues and these seem to be fairly few and far between. We have two iPhone 3Gs on our account and they work pretty good. Honestly, it’s the best smartphone I’ve had and I’ve been through quite a few WM6 devices prior to this.
I still don’t have service, so I’m not sure what AT&T is talking about when they say that service has been restored … not to me (Chicagoland area), I can still only make calls but not receive them.
Well, I do agree that the regular reps are pretty ignorant, but the Blackberry people are a step above. With them, I can actually carry a conversation.
I wish people would stop acting like no other carrier has problems or outages. Every carrier has it’s issues. AT&T just happened to have a pretty big issue on the wrong day. I had no problems with my iPhone or AT&T service so I’m glad about that but I feel for those who have had problems.