Now that this is behind us, I’m wondering if anyone has heard what actually happened.
Does Verizon do after-action reports that we could find?
Due to the scale of this I would expect an outage report to appear with the FCC in the next year.
I do think this highlights the increased frequency and impact of these outages.
Make sure you have backup plans for communications if one or more fails. While my personal impact was near nil many people use telemetry or navigation over cellular as a service and would have been impacted. If I was for example an uber driver impacted I may not be able to reach my destination, or I may not be able to summon one.
As the market squeezes margins our tolerance for faults also narrows. We saw this with supply chains 2020-present and I expect the rate will increase vs decrease in the coming years where a disruption has unexpected impacts.
Role play these outages and test them where possible.
- Jared
for anyone that finds this useful, you can get a 1 year esim with 30gb of data for about $30 on a diverse carrier from your primary, check esimdb.com (I don’t work for them, just enjoy the service)
That will be an interesting read.
I recently read the book "Rogers v Rogers" that covers the major Rogers
Communications outage in Canada from a couple years ago. The book is
mostly biographical, but it lays a good historical foundation for those
events.
Anyone else have any good book recommendations?
Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net> writes:
Not related to Verizon or outages at all (though it certainly was going to be a very expensive and large scale outage at the time), there’s a fascinating book about the group of investors and people who formed a new group to acquire the “v1.0” Iridium network out of bankruptcy, turn it into a DoD essential service/US government contractor, and run the second corporate incarnation of Iridium.
https://www.amazon.ca/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-Bloom/dp/0802121683
I’ve been a fan of US Mobile (also not an endorsement) for this purpose - my primary line is Verizon Business, but US Mobile provides access to all three of the major US carriers along with the ability to easily swap between them. Cheap enough to keep as a backup esim, too.
I think with the squeeze on margins getting tighter and tighter, all manner of bad things will escalate. Mark.
I’m hoping that some of the pushback and changes we have seen with on-shoring and supply chain diversity will continue to improve the situation, but the global ecosystem we find ourselves in hasn’t always been in our best long-term interests.
Mark, I’ll write a few more of my thoughts to you off-list.
- Jared