NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Thousands of people got a taste of life without a cellphone during Thursday's widespread outage. For hours, people were stuck in SOS mode.
People in multiple cities with multiple wireless carriers were disconnected from their colleagues and loved ones, unable to call or text, including people in our NewsChannel 5 newsroom.
"And like Debbie didn't even know, so people might not even realize because you don't know you're not getting missed calls because no one can tell you," said producer Ashley Skeen.
In Nashville, the wireless service interruptions began around 2:30 a.m. The outage affected mostly people with AT&T. In some cases, customers with carriers on the same tower as AT&T may have lost service too. Spots on cell towers are leased.
Steve Nordstrom with the School of Computing at Lipscomb University said this outage was a bit unusual. It wasn't fixed quickly. It took AT&T nearly 12 hours to restore wireless service to everyone affected. Sometimes that means there was cyber attack.
"The cause of these kinds of things are typically misconfiguration — human error. Large outages like this are also caused by nefarious activity, bad actors, international cyberattacks, for example," said Steven Nordstrom. "It's unclear if that's what's going on today, but I would be very cautious."
During the next coming days, look out for phishing schemes. Scammers might use this as an opportunity to steal your personal information by pretending to be someone calling from your network provider or cellphone company.
It is good to know that 911 and emergency services on your phone typically continue to work even if your carrier has problems.
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
