How You Doin? Phone, Internet and Power Outages Accross USA

Thunk about it. Third world R US or USA under major cyber attack?

I tried calling my Federal Credit Union back in Western New York today. The telephone company said that the number is no longer in service. Huh? So I called my brother and he said he got the same recording. He went to say that all phone and internet service is screwed up. It works then doesn't. They are getting numerous wrong number phone calls like never before.

So I tool around for service outages and this pops up:

August 12: Problems at Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless Outage in New York City, New York

New York City is 300 miles from Western New York.

Then here's another on New York City: August 7, 2020

New York City power outage: Blocks of Manhattan in the dark, tens of thousands still without power

Still not fixed and today's August 12, 2020

A Week After Tropical Storm Isaias, Thousands of New Yorkers Without Power


OK, so we can account for the New York City region but something is affecting Western New York 300 miles to the West.

Spectrum anyone? From August 4, 2020

Massive Spectrum outage covers much of country

Spectrum internet, television and phone service continued to suffer major outages across the country Tuesday, including much of Texas. Locally, Spectrum’s television, internet and phone service went out around 9 p.m. Sunday for many customers in the Rio Grande Valley and the outage continued into Tuesday afternoon. And nobody knows when it might be fixed. The website Outage Report showed a live map Tuesday afternoon showing major outages in Dallas, Houston and Austin, most of central Florida, Atlanta, Raleigh, North Carolina, Buffalo, New York, and New York City, the Chicago-Milwaukee area, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

I wrote a thread about ATT issues. They finally got back to me and partially solved my Block Chain Issue. Actually they jumped through hoops.

So whats up with all of the outages? Tropical storms, hot summers? Or riots on cue along with planned social disobedience and civil unrest? I knew a guy in commercial janitorial services He had the keys to the phone company. He also had access to shut off the power to half a large city if he wanted to. I know this guy and he doesn't make things up. Just sayin.

I have no opinion just thoughts. The best we can find out is here on ATS. So if interested please report out. I am near Columbia, South Carolina. Having our third Monsoon with last 7 days. It never rains down here. It pours busloads. All power is up and no Internet disruption. Phone is weird at times.

Here's a Real Time Outage map; USA

Outage Map

I have to get back to work.

a reply to: Waterglass

I'm fine down here in an Atlanta, GA suburb.
I have Verizon for cell, ATT Uverse for home internet and Comcast for my office internet. No issues with any of them.

I also use Office 365/Azure for some work stuff and no issues there either.

a reply to: peter_kandra

Thank you sir. Grass is real green this year. Decent rain.

Water Glass your friend is full of it .
Citys have what is called a power GRID . Its called a Grid for a Reason NO one transformer No one substation can take out power for half the city .

A bit city say like then one i am in Tucson may have 20 substations each station controls power flow to sections of the city IF one was shut down for any reason The other auto take over the load .

When citys DO lose power such as www.electricchoice.com... NUMBER 6 a software bug created a cascade effect domino .

If the grid is overloaded that can cause a cascade effect as the substations are are ready at full capacity try to balance it out .But every time people find these Flaws they redesign the system so it cant happen the same way again .
You dont really Think The Untied states is Stupid enough to make it That easy to take out or power ?
A system that weak The Us would be getting attacks daily .

I am in west central Florida and we have had no issues at all. You must live in a tiny town if one Janitor thinks he can shut down the power.. Doing so would get him listed as a terrorist and he would not see the light of day for a long time.

Forgot to mention that we have Spectrum. Verizon only owns Cell networks here anymore as they sold their TV and Internet years ago to Frontier and may God make that companies President and others go to Jail for ripping off most of Florida's residents, including myself.

a reply to: Waterglass

U.S. Cellular msg: We are experiencing service disruptions due to today's storms. We are working hard to restore service as soon as possible.


I got that message yesterday but never had any service disruptions. I'm in Illinois.

You have weather explanations for the New York area. The Chicago area was hit on Monday.

Derecho with 100 mph winds moves across the Midwest, bringing down trees and power lines in Chicago

I know it is CNN but it is weather news, harder to lie about.

Lots of weather caused problems in spread out places. It takes time to fix.

I haven't noticed any problems in North Georgia but have not tried contacting anything in the affected areas.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
You have weather explanations for the New York area. The Chicago area was hit on Monday.

Derecho with 100 mph winds moves across the Midwest, bringing down trees and power lines in Chicago

I know it is CNN but it is weather news, harder to lie about.

Lots of weather caused problems in spread out places. It takes time to fix.

I haven't noticed any problems in North Georgia but have not tried contacting anything in the affected areas.

I have a good friend from high school that moved up to southern Illinois. He will probably chew my butt if I try to contact him now because he works for the local Telecom there.

Looks like there's some issues.

downdetector.com...

a reply to: Waterglass

My internet and cellular service is down right now.

a reply to: midnightstar

That is the sole reason that NERC exists.

In August 2003, North America experienced its worst blackout to date, as 50 million people lost power in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and Ontario, Canada. A United States–Canada Power System Outage Task Force was formed to investigate the causes of the blackout and to make recommendations to prevent future blackouts.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 called for the creation of an Electric Reliability Organization (ERO) to develop and enforce compliance with mandatory reliability standards in the United States. This non-governmental, "self-regulatory organization" was created in recognition of the interconnected and international nature of the bulk power grid.

In April 2006, NERC applied for and was granted the designation of the ERO by FERC in July 2006. NERC also filed the first set of mandatory Reliability Standards with FERC, as well as filing the same information with the Canadian provincial authorities in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and with the National Energy Board of Canada.

From: Wiki on NERC

The level of redundancy built into these systems, even at the design phase, is staggering.

Now there are attacks that are occurring all the time, but due to the way the systems are designed and segmented, it would take a serious effort to take everything down at once. It would take a ton to even take a region down, much less the country. I used to work for the reliability coordinator for my region of the country, specifically in a cyber security fashion. If you want a way to take down grid sections, physical is the way to go. Hence some of the outages due to storm damage, being physical...

As for the OP, I live about an hour and 15 north of you, not a single outage of any service in probably 6+ months at least. Well aside from the one outage due to the jackasses doing construction behind my building cutting into a cable on accident.

The New York area is still recovering from tropical storm isaias ... or more precisely NY is still recovering from the mismanagement of PSGE as well as several telecommunication companies.

We didn't have internet access for a week ... got it back yesterday.

Four other households in my family didn't have power for a week.

a reply to: midnightstar

The janitor story is plausible. Maybe he is on call and responsible for some of those transformers. Hospitals and other big facilities with their own sub stations have people with power like that, because they need them. Often they have licences to operate the switching panels.

Often the grid is not a grid like you think but a ring-line or single line protruding out from the ring. At some point, that ring is fed so if the has access to that station, he really has that power / responsibility because it is part of their job.

Southwest MI still 10,000 without power from storm yesterday. 45,000 Out at the peak. just another day..

There was a TMobile/Verizon issue down here about 6 weeks ago (South Florida).

Apparently they share some of the same cell towers and for about 12 hours a large group of people were unable to make/receive calls, only text.

I’m on T-mobile and had no issues at all. Work phone is on Verizon and had no issues.

I actually just had to call Comcast/Xfinity yesterday to complain, the last month has been like I was on dial-up, I was about to snap. They said they’ve been making improvements, and that it results in some service disruptions. Got a $20 credit on my next bill. Suddenly I hngd sped up after I called. Really annoying

a reply to: Waterglass

Not in Michigan...except an overnight maintanence at 3:30a.m., up by 6:00.

All else...good.

Iowa here. I have dozens of pictures and videos of the damage from this midwest storm from Des Moines to Ames. All highways were shut down temporarily. I saw at least 30 semi turned over on both county highways and even on hwy35. SB 35 between ames and Ankeny was closed off. My datacenter stayed up on generators but lost connectivity over 3 separate ASN peers on diverse fiber pipes for more than 40 hours now and are running on an emergency line patched down to the city. I literally had to pull 9 servers from the datacenter and run them from my house as an emergency fix for 30 hours because I have not finished deploying all the redundant hardware to our backup datacenter in NJ. A high priority bundle is still down because there are so many poles knocked out around Cedar Rapids they will not let fiber techs in the areas to fix the breaks until the power is cleaned up. The damage in the city is significant but in the countryside it is devastating. Crops are flattened. I saw more than 20 silos demolished. Trees turned upside down. Barns and garages destroyed with debris spanning miles across fields. Id upload all my footage of the destruction but this site is lousy with uploads and i havent been able to upload anything for a month.

I've been having a really strange issue lately, where my internet will go out, and at the same time, my mobile data as well. It makes no sense, as I'm with two different companies. All connections, wi-fi and ethernet, totally dead, and I'll check my phone data (not connected) and my service drops completely at the same time as well. They'll both usually return simultaneously as well. My theories include some type of electrical interference and ghosts XD

a reply to: DobRozner

Ever since i upgraded to my samsing s20 phone supporting 5G i am missing calls and they take upto 10 seconds to connect when i answer. All kinds of problems with active calls dropping too.