https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32982150-AT-T-Suffers-outa...
And AT&T mobile is down across Kentucky: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32981927-Services-Suspicio...
Also reports above that calls into Tennessee aren't working.
It is either institutional incompetence, or malice, or laziness.
AT&T in TN is an epic example of all 3 and then some. The most recent unbelievably stupid thing I've personally observed was the construction of 15 miles of new fiber on county power poles; right beside a Verizon fiber line that had been there for a decade. They put no slack loops in theirs, VZW's run has many.
that line went up this year, and has been torn down and out of service 3 times, so far, that I know of. Oddly I hear the VZW line keeps failing shortly after the ATT trucks are seen, where I dont recall hearing much about failures on the VZW before this year. So perhaps there was a design consideration that suggested the construction method.
They are rapidly shutting down most of their enterprise IT data centers and the planning was done without consulting with their system architects about things like site paring for EBR and data replication, network coverage, etc.
That actually raises an interesting question, how are monopoly licenses valued? If their value can be bumped up every year on the balance sheet...
I wonder if we'll eventually see an "Amtrak" style nationalization for our POTS and related infrastructure. The firms with nothing sexier in their portfolio (Frontier) are frequently unhealthy, and the ones that do have other things to sell (Verizon, AT&) don't give it their full attention. It's no longer a competitive commercial product, but it serves enough of a public interest (i. e. not breaking a billion POTS-attached alarms, the high resiliency in natural disasters) that it can't just be dug up and scrapped for copper.
If so it's endemic. I think many of us in the "telecom infrastructure" adjacent industries are thinking of more than a handful of much more impactful and less hardened targets.
Certainly a sobering Christmas.
Same issue with internet peering in quite a few cities (no viable 2nd location, costs a lot of money to double up the gear, additona optical transport).
I was in finance when I looked up the physical address of our back up data center which was in another city ... 5km up stream from our main data center, both were within the 30 year flood plain of the river.