Presidential alert brings down networks in Northwest US or were they deliberately brought down?
Cell phone networks across the Pacific Northwest were hit by a mysterious disruption this morning minutes after the inaugural “presidential alert” — although at least one cellphone provider insists the two events were not related.
For several hours Wednesday, subscribers with several networks, notably AT&T and T-Mobile, reported being unable to download data or use their apps soon after the text alert, which was sent at 11:18 a.m. Pacific Time.
“The presidential text alert went out and after that I lost all internet, Gmail, apps — everything stopped working,” said Sarah Mendivel, a medical researcher at Seattle Children’s Hospital. When Mendivel finally got through to AT&T, she was told “they didn’t know what it was,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon.
www.seattletimes.com/business/regions-cell-networks-disrupted-after-presidential-text-alert/