I’m feeling vulnerable

[Tennessee Boy]

There was a bombing in downtown Nashville this morning.  At first it was perplexing why someone would set off a bomb in this manner early on Christmas morning when few people where around.   We now know they were targeting an AT&T switch facility and have had a major impact.   Most AT&T services are down over a large area in Tennessee,  and parts of Alabama, Kentucky and Georgia.  It’s affected area hospitals and the Nashville airport.  I live in the next county over from Nashville and our 911 services are out.  It’s scary how dependent we can be on the equipment in one building in our modern interconnected world.  One person who knows what they are doing can do a lot of damage.

[Glenn]

I don't know about AT&T, but T-Mobile has redundant switches.  If one goes out, the calls are re-routed automatically to another switch. This was intentionally designed for events like catastrophic natural disasters, but works just as well for domestic terrorism.

 

I have no doubt other infrastructures are designed in similar fashion.

 

[12poundbass]

I located AT&T here in Michigan for 5 years and they have plenty of redundancy, for natural disasters, and damages due to excavation but if a Central Office (switch center) is targeted and taken out I don’t know if redundancy would be effective or not especially if the heart of the operation is compromised. 
 

Sad situation either way. 

[Tennessee Boy]

As I understand it,  this is a fifteen story building full of wires and electronics.  It’s a bad situation.  There’s a hospital in Nashville that can’t access patient medical records because of this incident.  We rely on the Internet for critical services but it’s very vulnerable.   I’m wondering how long it will take to restore services.

[12poundbass]

12 minutes ago, Tennessee Boy said:

As I understand it,  this is a fifteen story building full of wires and electronics.  It’s a bad situation.  There’s a hospital in Nashville that can’t access patient medical records because of this incident.  We rely on the Internet for critical services but it’s very vulnerable.   I’m wondering how long it will take to restore services.

It definitely sounds like a Central Office. 
 

Based on my experience (I’m no expert by any means) the potential is there for it to take a very long time. 
 

To give you some examples why it could take a very long time, old copper cables aren’t color coated. I had a 2400 (4800 individual copper lines) pair paper cable get cut in half by a tree spade about 8 years ago. It took around 10 people working around the clock 4 days to splice it back together. That was one cable. Fiber optic is what things are being upgraded to. Fiber is difficult to get a good clean fuse on it and is usually just replaced in large sections which can take time as well. 

[Shimano_1]

I'm in central ky and our phone service has been out all day. Did some looking on the inter webs and found out what had happened.  Kinda felt like a tool for being upset about my phones considering what happened.  Hope they catch whoever did it and do mean things to em. It is definitely crazy if hospitals etc are being affected. One more jacked up thing in this wonderful year of 2020!

[A-Jay]

Not Good at All.

Hope this wasn't a 'practice run'.

Stay Safe

A-Jay

[Boomstick]

5 hours ago, Glenn said:

I don't know about AT&T, but T-Mobile has redundant switches.  If one goes out, the calls are re-routed automatically to another switch. This was intentionally designed for events like catastrophic natural disasters, but works just as well for domestic terrorism.

 

I have no doubt other infrastructures are designed in similar fashion.

 

AT&T should as well, but like any carrier it would matter on the area you're in. A lower population area would have fewer other switches to route through, but I would expect Nashville would have backups to the backups so to speak. And it looks like this one was a central office.

 

Terrorism sucks. Stay safe.

[Log Catcher]

I hope this is not the beginning of what to expect in the coming year.

[Mobasser]

I read about this bomb yesterday. Deliberate bombing here. Very bad situation! On the news, they said if this would have happened any other day, many people could have been hurt or killed. Stay safe

[slonezp]

The FBI have raided the house of a person of interest. A 63 year old man from Antioch, TN. I'm hearing rumors of suicide

[12poundbass]

2 hours ago, slonezp said:

The FBI have raided the house of a person of interest. A 63 year old man from Antioch, TN. I'm hearing rumors of suicide

The motive should be the news. This is ‘new’ so to speak and the infrastructure is caught with their pants down. 

[Glenn]

On 12/25/2020 at 8:17 PM, Boomstick said:

A lower population area would have fewer other switches to route through

I need to clarify my statement. I was referring to National Operation Centers, or NOC's for short. These are bigger than "switches".  For example, all the traffic on the East Coast can be routed through a single NOC, if needed.  However there are multiple NOC's strategically located across the country. Ergo, multiple redundancies.

 

And to be clear, these are guarded like Ft. Knox.

[Tennessee Boy]

They’re saying AT&T may have everything back online tonight.  I’m impressed.  

[TnRiver46]

I got hired to catch a groundhog that ate through some fiber optic cables years ago. It was a tiny fenced in area in the middle of downtown with a bunch of cable underground. The guy that hired me would point to a cable and say “now that goes to Washington DC” and “that goes to atlanta” and “we can’t have a groundhog eating all this.” Should have charged triple!!!

[Whatever]

In the mid 70,s, at the height of the cold war, I worked in a National Level Top Secret Facility that tracked Ivan in his back yard (the North Pacific). We had continuous, no fail, 24/7  functioning for 16 years. Until a rat chewed into a 440v feed line, and shut us down completely. We went "cold iron" for 5 days.

The best laid plans of mice and men!

(the rat had no known terroist affiliations)

[Tennessee Boy]

I work in IT and I have a lot of stories and I’ve heard many more from coworkers.  My favorite from a coworker,  a company had a critical server that went down around 2:00AM every Tuesday morning.  It had backup power and they could not figure out what was causing it to go down.   Finally they flew a guy in to spend the night to see if he could figure it out.   Sure enough,  at 2:00AM the janitor came in and unplugged the server to plug in his vacuum cleaner.  

[TnRiver46]

3 hours ago, Whatever said:

In the mid 70,s, at the height of the cold war, I worked in a National Level Top Secret Facility that tracked Ivan in his back yard (the North Pacific). We had continuous, no fail, 24/7  functioning for 16 years. Until a rat chewed into a 440v feed line, and shut us down completely. We went "cold iron" for 5 days.

The best laid plans of mice and men!

(the rat had no known terroist affiliations)

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to trap such a rat.........

 

a retired guy helps us on big projects at work. He was on a submarine during the Cold War, talk about vulnerable 

[Whatever]

I mostly served on surface ships. I always wanted to go to sea on a submarine. Once.

I honestly could not do that duty (I am claustrophobic). My grandfather was a bubblehead in World War One! I can dive deeper with scuba gear than he could in his "boat"!

If you ever read "Blind Man's Bluff", it will make you hair stand up!