On Thursday morning, AT&T users in many of the most populous cities in the US woke up to no network service on their phones. The major outage appears to have lasted more than 12 hours, leaving many people without one of their most critical lines of access to the modern world.
The carrier quickly apologized to customers.
“Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future,” the company said in a statement.
AT&T also assured people that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, and in fact blamed “the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network.”
For many customers, the outage was also a reminder of the perils of relying only on mobile phones, and it may have made some people rethink the place of a home device that used to be standard issue but is now nearly obsolete: the landline telephone.
Remember the landline?
Landlines are telephones that connect to specialized wiring in our homes. The iconic image is that of a rotary-dial phone — usually rented from the phone company — that either hung on the wall or sat on a counter or table, though push-button and later cordless landlines replaced many of those oldsters in the 1980s. Landline phones connect to one another through a global communication network that was built over more than a century. But as cellphones became broadly available and affordable, many people chose to drop their landlines altogether.Â
A 2022 survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only about 29% of US adults lived in a house with a landline phone, down from more than 90% in 2004. The crossover happened around 2015, which was also when smartphone sales entered a boom period that reshaped the tech industry and helped turn iPhone maker Apple into one of the world’s most highly valued companies.
Ann Williams is one of the folks who haven’t given up on their landlines…
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