Is AT&T Hiding A Widespread Voicemail Outage? (abc11.com) 70
Though people can still leave voicemail messages, "Some AT&T customers say they have not had access to their voicemail since the beginning of October," one local news site reported this week:
An AT&T spokesperson sent the following statement to ABC11 about the issue: "We're aware that some customers may be having difficulty retrieving their voicemail due to a vendor server problem. We're in contact with the vendor as they work to fix it and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
ABC11 received several messages from frustrated AT&T customers.
"I have been told multiple times that it would be fixed the same day. Today I was told there is no estimated repair date. I don't know what to do. I am a psychologist and people who have mental health issues call me," one said. "They get my message and leave me a voicemail. There is no indication that I won't be able to access it."
"Voicemail is a crucial function on most people's devices. Having it down for weeks is unacceptable," another said. "If they don't fix this issue they will be losing lot of customers. I am been calling daily, but no result."
Slashdot reader amxcoder writes today that AT&T eventually cited their vendor's server issue back on October 9th in their help forum, and that in the 11 days since, "the problem appear to be spreading." After contacting Tech Support on October 20th, it appears that Level One tech support is not aware of the problem, and Level Two reports the problem is affecting Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee. However California and possibly other states seem to be affected as well.
Because AT&T is being tight-lipped about this outage, even to it's own customers that it is affecting, it's difficult to know how many customers this is impacting. No official statement is being sent to customers, nor are customers being updated on progress or given an ETA on resolving the problem. Some online chatter is wondering if AT&T is trying to keep this "under the radar" as long as they can because of something more nefarious, such as a data breach, hacked servers, or even ransomware. Anyone's guess is a good as another without official public statement from AT&T.
ABC11 received several messages from frustrated AT&T customers.
"I have been told multiple times that it would be fixed the same day. Today I was told there is no estimated repair date. I don't know what to do. I am a psychologist and people who have mental health issues call me," one said. "They get my message and leave me a voicemail. There is no indication that I won't be able to access it."
"Voicemail is a crucial function on most people's devices. Having it down for weeks is unacceptable," another said. "If they don't fix this issue they will be losing lot of customers. I am been calling daily, but no result."
Slashdot reader amxcoder writes today that AT&T eventually cited their vendor's server issue back on October 9th in their help forum, and that in the 11 days since, "the problem appear to be spreading." After contacting Tech Support on October 20th, it appears that Level One tech support is not aware of the problem, and Level Two reports the problem is affecting Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee. However California and possibly other states seem to be affected as well.
Because AT&T is being tight-lipped about this outage, even to it's own customers that it is affecting, it's difficult to know how many customers this is impacting. No official statement is being sent to customers, nor are customers being updated on progress or given an ETA on resolving the problem. Some online chatter is wondering if AT&T is trying to keep this "under the radar" as long as they can because of something more nefarious, such as a data breach, hacked servers, or even ransomware. Anyone's guess is a good as another without official public statement from AT&T.
This is easy to solve (Score:5, Funny)
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Time to turn on the ASCII art nonsense filters again...
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Time to turn on the ASCII art nonsense filters again...
Are you reading at 3+?
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I could almost hear Sam Kinison saying "Surrrrre" as I read that.
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Whatever is happening (Score:1)
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Contract violation maybe?
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How so? At most, it is a civil matter, subject to ATT getting sued for failing to provide a contracted service. I can't see how it breaks any laws - is Honda criminally liable if your car won't start?
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is Honda criminally liable if your car won't start?
No, but lying about or hiding a known defect is illegal.
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Really? What crime is that?
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Doesn't matter - everyone knows megacorps don't have to obey the law.
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45. Unfair methods of competition unlawful; prevention by Commission (Sec. 5) (a) Declaration of unlawfulness; power to prohibit unfair practices; inapplicability to foreign trade (1) Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/defa... [ftc.gov] Have fun.
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Hidden because (Score:3, Funny)
People don’t use voicemail any more.
Their telegraph outage is even more severe.
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And some people still print their emails.
Re:Hidden because (Score:5, Insightful)
"I don't use voicemail, and therefore I can't imagine how anyone else could possibly use it either."
People still use Yahoo. Let that sink in a moment.
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People still use Yahoo. Let that sink in a moment.
I know a guy who still uses his AOL address...
Re: Hidden because (Score:2)
I know people who use AOL address for their business.
Heck I know groups that only communicate via mail. It can but fun doing business with them. Getting a PO in by mail processing the prepayment invoice sending that out waiting for a check. And then sending them the goods.
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And you think there is a functional difference between texting and 2-way paging. Just a nicer UI.
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And some people still use AOL and dialup! :O
Re: Hidden because (Score:1)
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I don't answer my phone unless I know the number or am expecting a call. If the caller doesn't leave a voicemail I never call back and don't answer future calls. It's either spam or it wasn't that important. If it's a personal contact they'll just text me if I don't answer.
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...don't answer future calls.
If you block them :
You will not see their text msgs
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Blocking spoofed numbers does me no good.
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I turned off voicemail entirely. I got fed up checking it only for it to be some recruitment spam or something.
Anyone who actually needs to contact me and who can't get through for some reason will have another way to do it - email or text message for example. Voicemail is 99.9% spam.
Re: Hidden because (Score:2)
Would be nice. I am currently waiting on my auto dealership to call me back with info on car repairs. If I didn't have voicemail, I'd have to pick up every call to make sure I get the message. I'd rather have VM enabled.
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Re: Hidden because (Score:5, Interesting)
People donâ(TM)t use voicemail any more.
You're correct about that, and so I'm wondering if what we have here is a situation where AT&T's VM servers being so chock full of half started robo telemarketing scams, happy birthday songs from grandma, and debt collection attempts that they can't function...
Maybe they're overflowing a 64 bit counter value with the number of unheard messages for too many customers...
ABC11, Not ABCNews.com (Score:2)
Interesting we're looking at NC's ABC station, not the network. No other reports filed on this that I can find... so is the problem in just that area?
The Russians aka GRU 74455 hit AT&T Voicemail (Score:1, Troll)
The word on net is that the Russian GRU hackers breached AT&T most likely through phishing email, then gained control of the severs, and are wreaking havoc as usual. This group is Russian state funded and relentless. GRU probably wiped the servers and AT&T is restoring from backup, the only question is how long has GRU been inside. No info on ransom ware.
I think these Russian just want to watch the world burn.
If anyone has any specific info on what they used, please post.
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uhm, Source please? I don't have that report.
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Sounds like the work of that dastardly Tulsi Gabbard.
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The word on net is that the Russian GRU hackers breached AT&T most likely through phishing email
On what net? Unsupportedconspiracytheories.com?
If anyone has any specific info on what they used, please post.
If anyone has any specific info on this claim, please post.
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Why would the GRU do that when they can quietly monitor everything, especially politicians' messages, hop onto other services, and know more without even being detected?
The business case for destruction is almost never there for state actors. Now, the script kiddies and general S$I& disturbers, they love vandalism. They aren't the long-term problem. The professionals are.
If I had to run one of these systems, I would constantly be looking for intrusion. My pen test team would be encouraged to fight relen
Check out twitter (Score:4, Informative)
For those who are questioning the legitimacy of the claims, go check out twitter. It seems legit IMHO.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%... [twitter.com]
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It's very legit. My parents had me try and troubleshoot a problem with the phones where a Voicemail PUSH came in from the servers about a new voicemail. Dial up the server, nothing there. We tried a few things like leaving a voicemail to force a refresh and on one attempt it took nearly 20 rings before the call was pushed to voicemail. Then my mother mentioned she had that lingering notification that can't be swiped away, for nearly 2 weeks. A call to support and they said they knew it was an ongoing proble
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For those who are questioning the legitimacy of the claims, go check out twitter. It seems legit IMHO
Not to discount AT&T's issue being real, but you realize you're holding Twitter postings up as a bastion of what's true and not? This after all we've been hearing about foreign agents using social media to influence how people perceive events and effect world politics.
Twitter? (Score:2)
Seriously? No thanks. There is nothing of value on twitter besides social justice and the outrage topic of the day.
Hilarious (Score:4, Interesting)
All things considered, it's possible the folks who would normally be fixing this problem were all recently outsourced to IBM and / or Accenture.
( AT&T has been laying off and outsourcing thousands every year, it just doesn't make the news very often. )
Everyone who has been outsourced KNOWS that they're only going to be with their " new " company long enough to extract knowledge / expertise before shipping the job itself over to India.
Thus, were I in said team working for IBM / Accenture right now, I would have some trouble remembering how to fix such things too.
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It's also possible the voicemail systems are also some legacy system and not many people actually know their way around it.
Outage in N. California (Score:4, Informative)
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Ah, the old subcontractor scapegoat. (Score:3)
"We're in contact with the vendor as they work to fix it and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
A company the size of AT&T can't even arsed to run their own voicemail system?
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Of course not. This is because running a Voicemail system is a risky business. You have the risk that it might get broken, and then you would have to go to all the bother of fixing it. The way to mitigate this risk is to "put it on" a third-party. So you buy the voicemail service from a third-party. If it breaks you merely have to say "we opened a ticket with the third-party and we have no further liability, sorry for your loss". The third-party vendor, meanwhile, knows that no matter what they do and
We don't care (Score:3)
Change Carrier Forwarding settings (Score:2)
Cell voicemail works as a carrier call forwarding setting. Unanswered calls are forwarded to a voicemail number. All you have to do is switch to Google Voice or set up a VoIP phone number to forward unanswered calls to and have them leave a message that way.
Who puts their business in jeopardy for weeks without taking action? And how does AT&T not have any workarounds posted?
Anything is possible, even likely (Score:3)
I used to work as if total failure was unthinkable. Not mere access failures, or data loss, but the total loss of a system, software, OS, all of it.
Sadly, I'm aware of two of these events within recent memory. One, OS updates led to file system corruption, made worse by attempts to recover, finally a bare-metal restore attempt led to discovering that those were literally empty. Nothing there. The recovery strategy was to delay admission until the oncoming system uplift was within a few months, apologize, recommend not rebuilding the system from (now admitted to be nonexistent) documentation, and just wait for the 'new system' to be deployed. I've worked where this would be responded to with mass dismissals. Everyone still has their jobs, same roles. Feh.
Second incident was the total loss of a system in production, no explanation. This time operated by a vendor, who basically threw their hands up and said 'sorry, can't recover'. Full rebuild. Again, a few months away from replacement. This time it was not a mere feature, but mission-critical, so it got rebuilt. No one involved in our management and administration will even speak the name of the vendor or system, they just turn their head. And no, the new system has none of their stuff in it, anywhere. Possibly that's why the vendor shows such a lack of urgency or accountability. But they are gone gone gone in a few weeks.
AT&T may have a vendor failure. They may have some disaster they cannot admit to. Doesn't matter. I doubt anyone there is sleeping, but if ya can't fix it, ya not so much needed as you were. Good luck guys. Post out. Move on.
Voicemail? fuck (Score:2)
Its a rare chance if my AT^T service actually has a god fucking damn signal over one bar and good fukin luck for 4G to actually show up let alone work, this has been happening since the start of my 2 year contract and THANK god I only have about a week (ish) left
voicemail? (Score:1)