Yesterday my phone went into “SOS Mode.”
I wondered if I had paid my bill. But my email receipts indicated I had.
I wondered if I was being subjected to some kind of spearphishing attack.
That seemed too an exotic answer to a simple question.
Kelly looked up “Verizon Outage” and found many results. Also: she uses AT&T.
And so, I didn’t have cellular coverage.
I missed it, but also, I didn’t. We were out and about. We got coffee in the morning and were going for a drive.
We listened to a cached Spotify playlist. A plenty long one, so we didn’t exhaust it.
It seemed as though GPS was working correctly. When I drove with a map open it kept track of my location with regards to the map. I entered a destination and it gave me correct directions. We were in our hometown–it seems iOS Maps.app used local maps.
I tried several times to restart my phone, but got no result.
Mashable created a “real time updating” blog post.
When we sat for coffee I used the coffeehouse Wi-Fi. The Verizon home page said:
Impact to wireless service
We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.
All told I had downtime of maybe 7 hours. I couldn’t make or receive phone calls. And I couldn’t make or receive text messages. I could message via iMessage, on Wi-Fi. And I could use other services.
I am not sure I have a takeaway from this.
I prefer it when things worked.
Verizon’s most effective communication tool was X aka Twitter: @VerizonNews. But that was 3 tweets over many hours. And no particular detail.
- 8:48AM:
- We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.
- 2:04PM:
- Verizon engineers are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today. We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.
- 4:18PM:
- Verizon engineers have fully restored today’s network disruption that impacted some customers. Service has returned to normal levels. If you are still having issues, we recommend restarting your device. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience. We appreciate your patience.
I think it started for me at about 7:45am and ended at 2:35pm. That’s about 7 hours without a fully functioning phone.
I think there’s a lot of resiliency in technology. But also computers are just not as good and as reliable as we might hope. They’re certainly not as good we movies and tv tell us they are. Computers solve crimes and save the world all the time on tv. In the real world they work… okay.
And that’s probably not good enough.
