The Great Phone Crash

I was expecting to write this morning on a book review for one of the three books I’m reading. Which one I hadn’t decided yet. I really want to reread them all again, so maybe I’ll have one ready for tomorrow.

At about 3:30, maybe a little before, my husband woke me up because he had just received a phone call from our son at work, saying his phone wasn’t working. (The workplace has landlines they can use on breaks.) So we did a bit of checking, and neither one of us could get our phone to reach the other one, or any other lines. It being the middle of the night, we didn’t try any number that would have someone woken at the other end. 😉

But our wifi worked, so I was able to quickly determine that it was not just us, there were thousands of people out at Down Detector. There still are, actually. More than when we checked at 4:00 am. But less than the high at 7:00 am. Part of that of course may be that most people didn’t start noticing that their phone wasn’t working until they got up in the morning. But as the number is going down, I’m hoping that they are starting to get a handle on things. Our own phones are still a bit iffy.

Cricket is carried by AT&T, which also is out. Some of the other carriers are also having some problems.

I fully expect things to be back to normal within 24 hours. Probably less. It never even occurred to me otherwise. But I have seen some people on the internet assuming that this outage is a DNS attack by our enemies, and that things are about to go down. I don’t think so. Not that I’m going to entirely block out the idea. Maybe some sort of attack, but if things were about to go down in a big way, they would have done so around 6 am our time, when most people were still asleep, and needed a bit of time to wake up and react.

But it is once again a reminder that there are many things that are a necessity today that didn’t exist a century ago. And mankind has not fully adjusted to them.