Landlines are not perfectly reliable either. I recall (in a time before 911 or cellular even existed) having no power and no phones for days at a time during bad snow/ice events and a few during clean up after tropical storms. Even as recently as 2003, Isabelle took out our power and phones, both land and cellular, for two weeks. Listening to the battery powered radio, they were asking people without power or phone to call and report it..... just remember thinking WTAF. Anyhow, we had not choice but to use chainsaws and other heavy equipment if we wanted to get out of the neighborhood. We survived. But, we didn't like it.
They're not putting any money into maintaining the landline infrastructure.
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on top of this my comcast bus. acct went offline for about an hour 2 nights in a row so i was alerted in the middle of the night.. just said outage but i am sure it was planned .. two convenient to go out same time 2 nights in a row.. i dont know why the f*** they cant send me a notification it is going to go out for maintainance so i can turn off my alerts.... mfffrs
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just skimming over. i always use google voice as a backup. free telephone number works on any device. good luck!
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Peripherally related, Spectrum (Comcast) sends out a text to ordinary me whenever there's an electric outage. Saying "we're working on it". It's automatic-they have no backup!
Still need internet for that though... Which is exactly what I didn't have during the AT&T outage...
But I agree Google Voice can be really handy in other use cases.
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Yeah, that's a bummer when it all goes like that. You could always use a cheap spot or iNreach device if you really needed to communicate. I had an nice Iridium phone when I had to have communications at all times but I didn't pay the bill on it.
I wonder if ATT got hacked. 
hope you are up and running again.
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ATT " it was an error in coding"
kek
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And they were already number 6 on the list of top coding errors for the same thing that happened in the 90's
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/worst-programming-mistakes-in-history/
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nice reference material!
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Thank you for that - it was a trip down memory lane!
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I just got a text from AT&T.
It's applying a credit to my account!
Didn't read, probably not applicable to me because I'm one of the Friends in the Friends and Family plan, lol.
Never got a text like that from the electric utility, lol.
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Probably because electricity is billed by your usage. If the power is out, you’re not using it and thus are not charged for it during a power outage.
Cell phone service is paid for a full month of service at a time. Same as cable TV and ISP companies. Most of these companies will provide a credit if their service is unavailable for a period of time, especially if the outage is the service provider’s fault.
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Back in the late 90s I would get a random call once every week or two. I would ask what number they were calling and it wasn't even close to mine so it wasn't a mis-dial. For example, my number might be 702-555-1212 and they were trying to call 212-867-5309.
After several months of this AT&T's solution was for me to get a new number. I told them this wasn't an option as I had too many things tied to that number. A few months after that they finally found the issue. It was a random bad switch in some datacenter.
It wasn't a big deal except for the random call that wouldn't believe they got a different number from what they had actually dialed. It was definitely an order of magnitude less than the number of SPAM calls I get these days.
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How else were they supposed to reach Jenny?
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