Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….

The AT&T cell phone network went down yesterday in dozens of states for multiple hours.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s happened many times before, the most recent of which was less than a year ago.

🚨 #BREAKING: MULTIPLE states are reporting 911 system outages, citing problems with AT&T

States most affected so far are California, Texas, Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida, and Georgia. Others are beginning to go offline as well.

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? pic.twitter.com/n4D9JDwLlo

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 28, 2024

The outage affected the 911 reporting system as well as basic phone calls, text messaging and the Internet.

In short, if you had AT&T, you had a brick for most of the day instead of a cell phone.

Watch this for more, from The Today Show:

Millions of AT&T wireless customers were affected by a software glitch that caused a major phone outage and even impacted some 911 services.

The company says it has now resolved the issue. pic.twitter.com/kCy6VcH8y9

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) August 28, 2024

Fox56 had more info:

AT&T customers in parts of the country are reporting an outage that’s left them without service or their iPhone devices stuck in SOS mode.

Reports of an outage peaked just before 6 p.m. CST on Downdetector, with more than 5,700 users complaining of a service disruption. By 8:35 p.m., the reports fell to just over 3,400.

According to USA Today, a company spokesperson said AT&T is working to fix a “software issue that may be disrupting the ability of some of our customers to connect to our wireless network.”

The spokesperson told the outlet that the outage seems to be affecting customers in the Midwest and on the East Coast, but Downdetector shows reports coming in from California too.

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Meanwhile, in some states, the outage is reportedly affecting calls to 911.

City officials in North Little Rock, Arkansas, said they were notified by AT&T that the outage could prevent customers from reaching emergency dispatchers.

“We are engaged and working to fully isolate and resolve the issue. The specific cause of the service outage has not yet been determined,” AT&T said in a statement to the city.

Alex Jones suggests it’s just a dry run before the big one, perhaps to occur right at the time of the election?

Here we go again. All a warm up for the election in 69 days. https://t.co/8QGJzL0hen

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) August 28, 2024

9to5Mac reports on the long history of problems the AT&T network has suffered, as well as the fines imposed for those outages:

An AT&T 911 outage back in 2023 has seen the company fined almost a million dollars. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says that the carrier not only failed to provide adequate backup coverage, but also didn’t let 911 centers know what had happened.

If this all sounds familiar, it is. The carrier was previously fined $5.25M for 911 outages back in 2017, and may well face a further sanction for another outage earlier this year …

AT&T 911 outages

More than 15,000 emergency calls were affected by two nationwide AT&T 911 outages in 2017.

The first outage occurred on March 8th and lasted for five hours, affecting 12,600 calls to 911. The second outage occurred on May 1st and lasted 47 minutes, resulting in 2,600 failed calls.

The company promised to make changes to ensure it couldn’t happen again, and to more promptly tell 911 centers what was going on.

Those changes didn’t seem to work too well, as there was another outage in August 2023, and the carrier again failed to keep affected 911 centers informed. The FCC says that this failure was due to human error.

The 911 outage occurred during testing of portions of AT&T’s 911 network. During the testing, an AT&T contractor’s technician inadvertently disabled a portion of the network, and AT&T’s system did not automatically adjust to accommodate the disabled portion of the network, resulting in the outage. The testing was not associated with any planned maintenance activities and, thus, did not undergo the stringent technical review that would have otherwise been conducted. The 911 outage lasted for 1 hour and 14 minutes, resulting in over 400 failed 911 calls.

An even larger failure occurred in February of this year.

A large-scale AT&T outage across the US has been acknowledged by the carrier, which says it is investigating […] Multiple 911 centers have reported that users have been unable to use the emergency number.

Meanwhile, Erik Prince told Patrick Bet-David that the 2023 outage was actually a cyber attack by China that was covered up.

Check this out:

Erik Prince Tells Patrick Bet-David The AT&T Phone Outage Was A Cyber Attack By China

Patrick Bet-David had someone on his show today who I’ve heard about before but didn’t really know much about.

I made the mistake of hitting “Play” just to listen to a bit and then I couldn’t put it down.

There was so much in here that caught my attention but one thing in particular that I will share with you in a just a moment.

But first, if you’re like me and maybe know the name but don’t really know much about him, here’s a short bio of who this man is: