[cdestroyer]

majority of 911 calls were being disrupted here due to nation wide disruption on some lines apparently including landlines. I can only guess as to why, but perhaps it only occured on portions of the network that were not upgraded to some level, however it could also have been some sort of cyber attack that shut down some of those non upgraded systems?? imagine what a bigger event would have caused!!

[neek]

Huh. My Verizon service was out for a while yesterday. Didn't realize it was so widespread; cities across the country reported outages. Verizon says "fiber issue". Agree we should all eat more fiber, but I'd be curious to know if anyone has additional details.

[Randito]

Did you try rebooting your phone.... A really high percentage of technical support calls are resolved by the customer restarting their device. So much so that that many phone trees include a prompt to ask the customer to try restarting while they are in the queue for a technician.

[neek]

Sometimes a reboot can rob you of the opportunity to troubleshoot an important problem...but for this, yes of course. Again check the news, there was a widespread outage. Many complaints on my local nextdoor forums too. (It did supposedly wedge some phones to the point a reboot was required.) Always a good idea to have Google Voice or some other alternative established if you don't have a landline.

[Cyclopath]

With a cell phone, try putting it in airplane mode and back to normal instead of rebooting for connection issues.

[flatsqwerl]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/solarcycle25/2022/04/20/sun-releases-mid-level-solar-flare/ I wonder if residual effect from this is possible?

[zephyr]

Here is coverage on the Verizon outage issue yesterday for more information on the cause and resolution. ~z Quotes from the West Seattle Blog: 5:06 PM: We’ve also received an update from Verizon: “A fiber issue in the core of the network caused some of our customers to experience intermittent call failures today. The issue was identified and resolved by Verizon engineers and the majority of impacted customers should be seeing service as usual. If any customer is still experiencing lingering issues, please restart your device. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.” One of the commenters added this: I could not make calls for 2 hours on wifi or 4g (and part of that time, could not send texts). I tried restarting my phone, but what seemed to work was resetting my network settings. Either that or it just happened to coincide with an overall restoration by VZW. If you’re still having issues reboot. some useful info in the comments here: https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/ That last link above is Verizon's information.

[cdestroyer]

space.com has a very good explanation for the cell phone disruption but like most newsy agencies they want funding and cannot provide free to the general public to offset wide spread panic. the latest cme or solar flare was type x which is the largest category and may have contributed to the outage as the air force also recorded a major radio disruption in the large category......expect more as the sun has entered a new cycle and seems to be very active...........

[BigBrunyon]

The thing about a phone is that it goes in your pocket!!!! But then you don't know it's there if it's on silent!!! These phones these days are TOO HARD!!!

[Cyclopath]

Could this solar flare have caused the porta potty incident?