The recent ATT service outage made headlines and datelines and had a lot of radio amateurs (who should know better) gloating and whipping out the tired “when all else fails” card. Turned out, the outage was brief, and mostly a nothingburger. Tech industry journalist Joanna Stern writing for her WSJ newsletter (Tech Things) had this to say:

"There’s no doubt the disruption was a huge pain for AT&T customers. I heard from a lot of them. But as I said in our quick column on it, if there’s any good news, it’s that over the past few years, phone makers and cell carriers have built strong backstops. There are now lots of ways to make calls and send texts over Wi-Fi".

The big carriers have spent piles of money hardening cell sites along with their network infrastructure over the last decade and while violent storms or nefarious hacker activities can and will continue to impact these services, the time has come for serious radio amateurs to quit celebrating each and every outage as though it were some prime opportunity to welcome Joe Sixpack into the fraternity.

It reeks of desperation…