said by CBS4 :In a statement released to CBS4, AT&T says, “Service has been restored for most wireless and wireline customers in the Miami area after an equipment failure at one of our facilities caused a service disruption. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
At the risk of starting another debate on what is or isn't a Single Point of Failure, "
an equipment failure at
one of our facilities" sure doesn't sound like a lot of redundancy.
Whatever that single piece of equipment at a single facility was, it managed to take down wired and wireless communications in several southern Florida counties (Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe, possibly more). Some AT&T mobile phone users managed to make calls during the outage (perhaps roaming on another carrier?).
Indian River County Sheriff's office reported losing both 911 and administrative phone service.
There was one news outlet that claimed that the outage also effected Comcast customers in that area (not sure how accurate that claim is since it was not mentioned elsewhere).
In the AT&T Uverse forum, one effected user reports that new IPv4 and IPv6 addresses have been assigned after the outage.
What I find sad is that the Internet evolved out of a DARPA project to create a highly resilient network (each node being independent from others and traffic being able to route around broken links). Yet here we are with yet another reminder of just how fragile the Internet has become.
Traditional phone service is being replaced with IP based services which makes them dependent on the Internet. Taken together we get a widespread 911 outage from an equipment failure in one AT&T facility