Subscribers to AT&T’s video service U-verse lost service, according to a report in Hillicon Valley. Traced to problems associated with a software upgrade, it deprived some customers of video, internet and phone service in one fell swoop.
It apparently took AT&T to isolate the problem. At first, a faulty server was suspected as the culprit before the correct diagnosis was hit upon.
Less than 1% of the service’s 7.4M subscribers were said to be affected, but at least one person complained that the outage lasted some 40 hours.
RBR-TVBR observation: Welcome to the 21st Century, where one small mistake has unprecedented snowballing power. Somebody misplaces a digit somewhere and an entire community can be blacked out.
We note that MVPDs and phone companies have no problem figuring out things they can charge us for. It always seems much more difficult to charge them when we aren’t getting service for which we paid for one reason or another. In the case of this household, there have been frequent disruptions of internet service of various durations of late.
Over-the-air television, on the other hand, almost never suffers a disruption of service, even under the duress of a meteorological catastrophe, and on the rare occasions that a station is knocked off the air, at least it’s not something consumers are paying for up front.
