A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Verizon says a widespread outage affecting tens of thousands of customers has been resolved. Calling and data services were down for customers throughout the U.S. on Wednesday, including users on other services. Now, Verizon has apologized but so far offered no explanation. So for more, we called up Lee McKnight. He's an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University who researches wireless grids. Professor McKnight, I'm glad we were able to get ahold of you, considering all the struggles people had yesterday. So how common is an outrage, an outage - it was an outage and an outrage, I think - like the one we saw yesterday?
LEE MCKNIGHT: Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. I'm calling in from my Verizon phone.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter) Nice. Nice.
MCKNIGHT: So I'll just say, unfortunately, outages are a frequent occurrence, a fact of life these days for major telecommunications firms. If you just look, rewind the clock, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile have all been down over the last 18 months.
MARTÍNEZ: Oh, wow. OK. So, yeah, AT&T reported outages, too. I mean, how are their networks, AT&T and Verizon's networks, how are they connected?
MCKNIGHT: Well, they all - OK, I've thought of an analogy that might help...
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.
MCKNIGHT: ...Your listeners. Imagine not being able to get on I-95 between Boston and Washington, which was where a lot of the outages were concentrated. So they're just like, the on-ramps don't work. Every single day, these virtual networks are being rebuilt. They're software-defined networks. And if there's just something wrong and there's no on-ramp, you just can't connect the call. The network itself may be fine, but there's no way to get from here to there. So T-Mobile, AT&T's networks were fine. But if you tried to call over to Verizon, you couldn't get on. Or a number of other services weren't working.
MARTÍNEZ: So just one big frustrating mess, it sounds like. And there's still no official information on what causes. What do you think happened? What are the possibilities?
MCKNIGHT: Well, I would say, we've seen this movie before, unfortunately. Modern telecom networks are cloud networks. 5G networks are mainly, like, hundreds of different cloud services. The telecom companies haven't yet adjusted their training to that reality, that their staff have to be expert not just in cell towers and wireless, like we think about...
MARTÍNEZ: Wow.
MCKNIGHT: ...But about cloud services like AWS or Microsoft or Google. And so with some little mistake - a cloud misconfiguration is the phrase - it takes out one of these cloud services and now you can't get on the highway, and you can't connect your call. And those one error can then cascade because these systems are so big and complicated.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter) Oh, no.
MCKNIGHT: It takes out - you know, things happen like they did yesterday.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. I'm wondering, professor, is it still worth it to have a home landline just in case?
MCKNIGHT: Well, first, having a wireless or separate, like a backup network of some form - like, thinking about what you would do in case of an outage - that's definitely worthwhile. I'll have to admit I don't have a landline. And I haven't had one in a long time myself, personally. So I'm living at a certain risk. But there's other, you know, networks around me. So having a contingency plan is definitely worthwhile.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. Lee McKnight is an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Professor, thanks.
MCKNIGHT: Thank you.
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