Can Ma Bell Boogie?
March 25, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
AT&T provides numerous communication and information services to the US government and companies. People see the blue and white trucks with obligatory orange cones and think nothing about their presence. Decades after Judge Green rained on the AT&T monopoly parade, the company has regained some of its market chutzpah. The old-line Bell heads knew that would happen. One reason was the simple fact that communications services have a tendency to pool; that is, online, for instance, wants to be a monopoly. Like water, online and communication services seek the lowest level. One can grouse about a leaking basement, but one is complaining about a basic fact. Complain away, but the water pools. Similarly AT&T benefits and knows how to make the best of this pooling, consolidating, and collecting reality.
I do miss the “old” AT&T. Say what you will about today’s destabilizing communications environment, just don’t forget that the pre-Judge Green world produced useful innovations, provided hardware that worked, and made it possible for some government functions to work much better than those operations perform today.
Thanks, MSFT, it seems you understand ageing companies which struggle in the midst of the cyber whippersnappers.
But what’s happened?
In February 2024, AT&T experienced an outage. The redundant, fail-safe, state-of-the-art infrastructure failed. “AT&T Cellular Service Restored after Daylong Outage; Cause Still Unknown” reported:
AT&T said late Thursday [February 24, 2024] that based on an initial review, the outage was “caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack.” The company will continue to assess the outage.
What do we publicly know about this remarkable event a month ago? Not much. I am not going to speculate how a single misstep can knock out AT&T, but it raises some questions about AT&T’s procedures, its security, and, yes, its technical competence. The AT&T Ashburn data center is an interesting cluster of facilities. Could it be “knocked offline”? My concern is that the answer to this question is, “You bet your bippy it could.”
A second interesting event surfaced as well. AT&T suffered a mysterious breach which appears to have compromised data about millions of “customers.” And “AT&T Won’t Say How Its Customers’ Data Spilled Online.” Here’s a statement from the report of the breach:
When reached for comment, AT&T spokesperson Stephen Stokes told TechCrunch in a statement: “We have no indications of a compromise of our systems. We determined in 2021 that the information offered on this online forum did not appear to have come from our systems. This appears to be the same dataset that has been recycled several times on this forum.”
Leaked data are no big deal and the incident remains unexplained. The AT&T system went down essential at one fell swoop. Plus there is no explanation which resonates with my understanding of the Bell “way.”
Some questions:
- What has AT&T accomplished by its lack of public transparency?
- Has the company lost its ability to manage a large, dynamic system due to cost cutting?
- Is a lack of training and perhaps capable staff undermining what I think of as “mission critical capabilities” for business and government entities?
- What are US regulatory authorities doing to address what is, in my opinion, a threat to the economy of the US and the country’s national security?
Couple the AT&T events with emerging technology like artificial intelligence, will the company make appropriate decisions or create vulnerabilities typically associated with a dominant software company?
Not a positive set up in my opinion. Ma Bell, are you to old and fat to boogie?
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2024
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