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Comment by c-linkage | Hacker News Reader

I'll take a chance here and say this was a hack, possibly at the equipment-level. One major carrier having an outage? Possible. But three? On different networks?

Even if its not a hack I'd love to see the root cause on this one! Communications is critical infrastructure, so I'm gonna guess the government will demand a full report.

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Sounds like it's really only AT&T. Most likely somebody screwed up a configuration change and took out a lot of capacity.

There is some shared infrastructure in the PSTN that all network operators use. This smells more like an SS7 outage to me than a hack, but we'll have to wait to find out.

Backhoe fade?

Back in my circuit switched days, we lost half of our US long distance routes, because a farmer in Wyoming dig up an unmarked fiber link. Hence, backhoe fade.

Or a borked update to some piece of hardware that's used by all 3. Hanlon's razor and all that.

"A Verizon spokesman reached by CNBC said there was no issue with the Verizon network and their customers are only impacted if they try to reach out to the carrier experiencing the problem."

Sounds like only one had an outage

I'm 50% hack and 50% BGP but my gut says cyberattack.

When you lose your own network, your phone connects to a different one to be able to make emergency calls. One carrier knocking down other carriers is entirely plausible.

Probably Huawei related

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