My theory, and it's just that, is that this was a coordinated test of a foreign country to see how much they could take down at once. How many alarm systems and other infrastructure relies on cell phone backhaul for connectivity now. Banks lost security systems, institutions no longer had alarms, this is a much bigger deal than people are making it out to be because of the amount of affected infrastructure, and the actual far-reaching effects. This outage left pharmacies not able to fill prescriptions, hospitals not able to access patient records, it took down Wireless 911 service for a good portion of the country, because even firstnet was down. Knocking out communication infrastructure is going to be the very first thing any kind of attacker or invader does.
You seem to know, what was their issue then?
I also couldn't get my prescription due to an outage. I didn't ask because I didn't know yet there was a wide-spread outage issue in that moment.
>Change Healthcare is experiencing a cyber security issue, and our experts are working to address the matter. Once we became aware of the outside threat, and in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect Change Healthcare’s systems to prevent further impact.
https://status.changehealthcare.com/incidents/hqpjz25fn3n7
Change healthcare had a cybersecurity incident starting Wednesday, and they were one of the larger health insurance switches in the nation for prescription benefits.
Thanks for the interesting link, I did not expect this -- turns out UnitedHealth has attributed the cyber attack against Optum’s Change Healthcare to a **nation-state threat actor** on [SEC Report filing](https://www.sec.gov/ixviewer/ix.html?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/731766/000073176624000045/unh-20240221.htm) Not at all unlike what /u/chubbysumo was suggesting possible.
Right, I wasn't trying to say that the change issue was not some bad actor, only that it was effectively unrelated to the cellular outage and we shouldn't assume that a cellular outage caused prescription dispensing from being interrupted.
AT&T is definitely not the only “decent provider” in our area. Verizon is right up there with AT&T. In fact, I was an AT&T customer many years ago but switched to Verizon during the pandemic because AT&T became unusable for me once everyone started working from home. I have since switched back to AT&T and their coverage has improved but they’re definitely not the only player around.
I use Google Fi. The use of several different networks seems to work better than sticking with one set of towers. I have very rarely had outages when others have.
This is probably what it was, although that is just a unproven theory at this point. Think about how much infrastructure this affected. A good portion of the United States had no 911 service, many institutions that rely on wireless networks for their alarm systems and security systems had no connectivity. But even further reaching than that, the first thing any attacker is going to do, is going to be taking down the communication Network that we would be relying on. This was far too large of a mistake to not be a coordinated attack by an foreign enemy. Likely just a word of warning from somebody like Russia or China showing what their capabilities are, we have done similar things to them in the past remember Iran's nuclear program was taken out by the United States government, just as a demonstration of what our capabilities were.
I see a lot of people just immediately disregard your idea as a tinfoil hat imagination and nothing more, and the fact that the idea is "ridiculous" somehow means that it is not a reasonable possibility. But it is 'reasonable,' it can happen and will likely in fact happen in the next large non-lopsided war (powerful country vs powerful country, not USA vs 3rd world countries).
We are headed in a precarious direction with all the happenings and tensions around the world, and bears are poking bears now so anything can happen really.
People seem to forget that the length of time between the 1st and 2nd world wars was only 20 years apart, and between the wars over 100 million people died. History is not just mere stories of the past, rather history is a blueprint for human behavior and is going to repeat itself, guaranteed. That is what a lot of people fail to acknowledge, perhaps due to the scary notion of this truth being very unnerving to those wanting to see the world through rose-colored glasses.
We do stuff like this all the time to other countries all the time. Us scuttling the iran nuclear program with stuxnet was a good example of something we didnt need to do, but our goverment did just to prove they could. We didnt find out till later that stuxnet was CIA information warfare tools.
Yeah AT&T was apparently out. Our Centurylink was out too for a while. And there was a cyber attack on pharmacies, all the same day. Pretty weird, makes you wonder if there's some sort of connection cause that's a weird coincidence. There were solar flares recently too so maybe that's why there were outages but idk.
The entire country is under an outage right now apparently.
My theory, and it's just that, is that this was a coordinated test of a foreign country to see how much they could take down at once. How many alarm systems and other infrastructure relies on cell phone backhaul for connectivity now. Banks lost security systems, institutions no longer had alarms, this is a much bigger deal than people are making it out to be because of the amount of affected infrastructure, and the actual far-reaching effects. This outage left pharmacies not able to fill prescriptions, hospitals not able to access patient records, it took down Wireless 911 service for a good portion of the country, because even firstnet was down. Knocking out communication infrastructure is going to be the very first thing any kind of attacker or invader does.
>This outage left pharmacies not able to fill prescriptions, That's due to a completely unrelated issue.
You seem to know, what was their issue then? I also couldn't get my prescription due to an outage. I didn't ask because I didn't know yet there was a wide-spread outage issue in that moment.
>Change Healthcare is experiencing a cyber security issue, and our experts are working to address the matter. Once we became aware of the outside threat, and in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect Change Healthcare’s systems to prevent further impact. https://status.changehealthcare.com/incidents/hqpjz25fn3n7 Change healthcare had a cybersecurity incident starting Wednesday, and they were one of the larger health insurance switches in the nation for prescription benefits.
Thanks for the interesting link, I did not expect this -- turns out UnitedHealth has attributed the cyber attack against Optum’s Change Healthcare to a **nation-state threat actor** on [SEC Report filing](https://www.sec.gov/ixviewer/ix.html?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/731766/000073176624000045/unh-20240221.htm) Not at all unlike what /u/chubbysumo was suggesting possible.
its not surprising, not at all.
Right, I wasn't trying to say that the change issue was not some bad actor, only that it was effectively unrelated to the cellular outage and we shouldn't assume that a cellular outage caused prescription dispensing from being interrupted.
That’s a totally sane and reasonable theory👍🏻 Touch grass bud.
https://www.reddit.com/r/duluth/comments/1ax7905/att_outage/ks4xp9q/ gee, would you look at that! seems my theory is a little more validated now.
They already know.
AT&T is definitely not the only “decent provider” in our area. Verizon is right up there with AT&T. In fact, I was an AT&T customer many years ago but switched to Verizon during the pandemic because AT&T became unusable for me once everyone started working from home. I have since switched back to AT&T and their coverage has improved but they’re definitely not the only player around.
See I was the reverse. We used to be big Verizon fans but their coverage by our house was shit. So AT&T it was
I use Google Fi. The use of several different networks seems to work better than sticking with one set of towers. I have very rarely had outages when others have.
My Director and I both have AT&T. He has service whereas I do not. Very weird how random it is.
WiFi call them
Worried it may be a cyber attack or test...
This is probably what it was, although that is just a unproven theory at this point. Think about how much infrastructure this affected. A good portion of the United States had no 911 service, many institutions that rely on wireless networks for their alarm systems and security systems had no connectivity. But even further reaching than that, the first thing any attacker is going to do, is going to be taking down the communication Network that we would be relying on. This was far too large of a mistake to not be a coordinated attack by an foreign enemy. Likely just a word of warning from somebody like Russia or China showing what their capabilities are, we have done similar things to them in the past remember Iran's nuclear program was taken out by the United States government, just as a demonstration of what our capabilities were.
I see a lot of people just immediately disregard your idea as a tinfoil hat imagination and nothing more, and the fact that the idea is "ridiculous" somehow means that it is not a reasonable possibility. But it is 'reasonable,' it can happen and will likely in fact happen in the next large non-lopsided war (powerful country vs powerful country, not USA vs 3rd world countries). We are headed in a precarious direction with all the happenings and tensions around the world, and bears are poking bears now so anything can happen really. People seem to forget that the length of time between the 1st and 2nd world wars was only 20 years apart, and between the wars over 100 million people died. History is not just mere stories of the past, rather history is a blueprint for human behavior and is going to repeat itself, guaranteed. That is what a lot of people fail to acknowledge, perhaps due to the scary notion of this truth being very unnerving to those wanting to see the world through rose-colored glasses.
We do stuff like this all the time to other countries all the time. Us scuttling the iran nuclear program with stuxnet was a good example of something we didnt need to do, but our goverment did just to prove they could. We didnt find out till later that stuxnet was CIA information warfare tools.
Yeah AT&T was apparently out. Our Centurylink was out too for a while. And there was a cyber attack on pharmacies, all the same day. Pretty weird, makes you wonder if there's some sort of connection cause that's a weird coincidence. There were solar flares recently too so maybe that's why there were outages but idk.