Phoenix (AP) – Christmas Day bombing Downtown in Nashville, South U.S. Hundreds of miles in the U.S. led to phone and data service shutdowns and disruptions. Raised new concerns about communication vulnerabilities.
The blast severely damaged key AT&T network facilities, Is an important hub that provides local wireless, internet and video service and connects to the regional network. Backup generators went down, which took service hours after the explosion. The fire broke out and forced evacuation. The building was flooded, with more than three feet of water later in the basement; AT&T said there is water on the second floor until Monday.
The immediate reactions were surprisingly widespread. AT&T customers lost service – phone, internet or video – in large parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. There were 911 centers in the region that could not make calls; Others have not received critical data related to callers, such as their locations. Phones and internet from the Nashville Police Department failed. The stores only went cash.
In some hospitals, electronic medical records, Internet service or phone stopped working. Flights were suspended for about three hours at Christmas at Nashville Airport. Rival carrier T-Mobile There were also service problems 250 miles from Atlanta, as the company uses AT&T equipment to move customer data from the towers to the T-Mobile network.
“People don’t even realize their dependence until they fail,” said Dr. Schmidt, a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University. “I don’t think anyone recognized the role of the special building,” he said.
The bomber struck shortly after noon in the heart of Nashville’s historic downtown, injuring several people and damaging dozens of buildings. Federal officials are investigating the purpose and have not said whether the AT&T building was targeted specifically.
AT&T said its wireless wireless% wireless network was re-installed on Sunday. As of Monday evening, AT&T said “almost all services” are backed up. On Wednesday, it was “activating the last of the remaining wireline devices.”
AT&T said it sent temporary cell towers to help affected areas and diverted traffic to other facilities as it works to restore power to the Nashville building. But not all traffic can be rearranged, spokesman Jim Greer said, and there were physical devices that had to be fixed in the building that were part of an active crime scene, complicating the reach of AT&T workers.
Democrat Rip, who represents Nashville in Congress. “We rely on all phones, cell phones, TV and the internet to outage for any reason,” Jim Cooper said in an emailed statement Wednesday. He said the U.S. “needs to tighten our telecom facilities so that we have more redundancy and reliability” and called for a congressional hearing on reducing telecom vulnerabilities.
The impact on emergency services may have raised the most serious flag. At one point, about a hundred 911 centers in Tennessee alone had service problems, said Brian Fontes, head of the National Emergency Numbers Association. David Turetsky, a lecturer at the University of Albany and a former public safety officer with the Federal Communications Commission, said the 911 call center should still be operational even if the phone company’s hub is damaged. If many call centers had been out of service for several days, “that’s worrying,” he said.
Experts such as Cooper and Fantas also gave AT&T credit for their work in re-establishing the services. “In this case, it’s pretty cool to be able to get and run some services within 24 to 48 hours of a catastrophic blast,” Fontes said.
Local authorities turned to social media on Christmas Day, posting on Facebook and Twitter that 911 is down and trying to reassure residents by offering to call another number. A Facebook page for Morgan County 911 Northern Alabama said Saturday that Alabama 911 centers are up and running, but AT&T advises customers to try calling through the Internet, and go to the local police or fire station if they can’t get through.
The Nashville Police Department uses the FirstNet system, developed by AT&T, which carriers take pride in providing “fast, highly reliable interoperable communications” in emergencies and prioritizing first responses when the network is under stress. But problems arose around noon on Friday, spokeswoman Christine Mumford said. The department had to turn to backup provider, Centurilink, for its landlines and internet at its headquarters and on the eastern border, and got loner cellphones and mobile hotspots from Verizon.
The transition to backups was “really unified,” Mumford said, although police could not make calls to the police area. He said the AT&T service started coming back on Sunday and by Wednesday morning, the overall service with cellphones, internet and landline was “almost 90% up”.
Parthenon, a replica of the Parthenon Museum in Athens, three miles from the blast, did not have a working phone even four days after the blast. But its credit-card system came back online on Tuesday, said John Holmes, assistant director of Metro Parks, the museum’s owner. On weekends, the museum was only for cash, although it puts people without cash.
It’s not that the physical weakness of communication networks comes as a surprise. Natural disasters such as hurricanes often destroy the service because of power outages, wind, water or fire damage. Recovery can take days, weeks or more. Hurricane Maria leaves Puerto Rico in a nearby communications blackout With destroyed telephone poles, cell towers and power lines. Six months later there were also areas without service.
Software software bugs and equipment failures have also caused widespread problems. December 2018 Centurilink Outage Lasted more than a day and interrupted 911 calls in more than two dozen states and affected as many as 22 million people. These include blocked calls for Verizon customers and busy signals for Comcast customers, both of which have used Centurilink’s network.
Turesky said that avoiding an issue of failure is important for a number of reasons, whether it has to do with physical harm, human error, adverse action or any of the above. “We need to make our network resilient regardless of earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorists, cyber attackers or other threats.”
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