Tag: network outage

  • The details on AT&Ts massive outage last week and the compensation coming your way if you’re an AT&T customer

    The details on AT&Ts massive outage last week and the compensation coming your way if you’re an AT&T customer

    As our headline suggests, AT&T experienced a massive outage Feb. 22 which affected their cell network nationwide. The outage affected over 70,000 reported customers (the actual numbers are certainly much higher) and left many unable call, text or even reach 911 for 12 hours. Many police departments report seeing an increase in 911 calls as some customers tried dialing to see if the call would go through.

    AT&T had been seeing an increase in outages affecting their networks ahead of the major outage that occurred last Thursday. The outage lasted just under 12 hours and it was enough time for speculation as to the cause to run rampant across the internet.

    AT&T has confirmed the outage was not due to a cyber incident but instead a botched update that took their networks offline. They also confirmed no customer data was lost In the event. The outage hit consumers and business customers alike.

    According to AT&T’s own landing page about the incident, consumers will be seeing a credit issued to their accounts automatically ($5.00 at the time of writing) and they say they will work with business customers individually to compensate for the down time.

    For some customers that might feel like too little to compensate for the inconvenience caused and at least one state’s attorney general agrees, with New York Attorney General Letitia James announcing they’ll be conducting an investigation into the matter.

    “Americans rely on cell service providers for consistent and reliable service to help them with nearly every aspect of their daily lives,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said. “Nationwide outages are not just an inconvenience, they can be dangerous, and it’s critical that we protect consumers when an outage occurs.”

    There are also some concerns surrounding the credit that’s going to be issued and whether scammers may take advantage of the situation for their own gain. Consumers should be extra vigilant when opening and responding to emails relating to credit or compensation from AT&T. At the time of writing AT&T has said consumers do not need to do anything on their end to receive the credit. We especially want to warn against clicking on any links with the promise of compensation, which is inadvisable well beyond the current situation.

    Consumers should also avoid responding to text messages or phone calls requesting their information to receive the credit, again AT&T will not be contacting customers directly, and any communications should be directed at official lines of communication. If you’re not sure how to contact AT&T, we suggest referring to a recent bill.

    For businesses, downtime like this can be more than an inconvenience, it can affect your business in major ways and be financially very costly.

    At Valley Techlogic, we have strategies  to prevent outages from affecting your business or your bottom line and our clients rely on our expert advice for navigating technology solutions for their business. Reach out to us today to learn more.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.

    This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.

  • The Massive Internet Outage and The Human Error Behind It

    The Massive Internet Outage and The Human Error Behind It

    A number of major websites were down yesterday morning, including Google, Amazon, Reddit and Twitch. The outage lasted for an hour and even broke services such as Twitter’s emoji.

    The outage occurred through Fastly which is a cloud computing provider and highlights how interconnected (and sensitive) the world wide web really is.

    The error occurred with something called the Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is a geographically distributed network of proxy services and data centers. They came about when performance bottlenecks in the 90’s were causing slowdowns, especially as use exploded.

    By distributing the load it allowed for the faster connectivity and increased bandwidth we enjoy today, along with better reliability. CDN nodes are deployed at multiple locations, and while the entire internet won’t go down if one is affected, as yesterday proves it can still cause significant issues.

    So, what caused yesterday’s issue in the first place?

    Believe it or not the thing that brought down all those major players was actually a customer error. A dormant bug in Fastly’s code reared it’s head on Tuesday when a customer changed updated their settings.

    This setting change (which was a valid configuration) triggered a specific circumstance which activated the bug and caused Fastly servers to begin reporting errors throughout 85% of their network.

    Fastly claims they detected the error within one minute which allowed them to contain the incident within an hour. They say they should have anticipated this error could occur in their messaging on the incident. Fastly maintains one of the largest CDN’s on the internet.

    While it was a relatively short outage, the cost to the websites that were down is still staggering, Early estimates indicated Amazon alone could have lost $32 million in sales.

    This outage indicates how truly disruptive technology related downtime is. Even for small business’s the costs can be extreme. Look at our chart below to see just how much downtime costs can add up.

    A Chart With Downtime Costs

    We know these numbers seem extreme, but if you tally up potential sales lost and the cost of just running your business during an outage – it really can add up fast.

    If you’d like to learn more about what downtime really costs you, as well as how to prevent it, we have a free report on this topic you can find here.

    We help the business’s we support prevent unnecessarily downtime every day. If you’re finding yourself navigating this and other technical problems – we can help. Visit our plan page to see if Valley Techlogic could be a good fit for your business.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these tech articles from the last week.

    This article was powered by Valley TechLogic, an IT provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.