Huge AT&T 3G Outage in San Francisco Area

Ryan Whitwam — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:17:35 -0600

Reports are showing up in various places indicating that AT&T is having major service disruptions in the San Francisco Bay Area. The nature of the problem seems to vary based on location. In some areas, calls are going through but data and SMS are down. In others, customers have no service at all. In still other areas, everything seems to be fine, leaving AT&T customers there to wonder why all their AT&T-using friends have their phones off.

This fiasco comes only days after AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega finally acknowledged the problems with the service quality in some cities. He promised to work to improve service in areas like San Francisco and New York. Now this happens… funny how the universe works sometimes.

Customers are reporting that AT&T reps are informing them of a 24-48 hour wait to get data and SMS services back up. AT&T has made a statement saying, “We are seeing a hardware issue in downtown San Francisco that is causing some degradation in service. GSM and EDGE voice and data services are still accessible. Our experts are aware and working to resolve as quickly as possible.” Indeed, users are reporting that turning off 3G results in solid EDGE access.

Sound off in the comments if you’ve been affected by this.

Microsoft Azure Shut Out Users Over Weekend - Should We Expect This from Cloud Computing?

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:05:33 -0500

The promise of hosted application "cloud computing" platforms is the ability to work anywhere, anytime. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the latest storm to obscure the promise of hosted applications hit its Windows Azure development platform last weekend. It was unavailable for 22 hours on March 13 and 14, eWeek reports.

It should be noted that Windows Azure, introduced at last October's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), is still in its test phase. It's due to become generally available before the 2009 PDC in November, according to eWeek. Although it's still in testing, an essentially day-long outage isn't good news for Azure.

However, as we have pointed out here and here in reference to past Gmail and Google Apps outages, cloud computing in general is vulnerable to service disruption. Charles King, an analyst from PUND-IT Research quoted by eWeek, had this to say about the balance between cloud computing availability and price, referring to Amazon's hosted application platform:

At one point during the briefing, they [Amazon] said they’d guarantee 99.99 percent availability. Their comment was they believed a significant population of businesses didn’t want to pay the price for five-nines [99.999] capability.

So, how about it, developers and users? If you're currently using cloud computing apps and services, have you been significantly affected by service disruptions? Would you pay more for less downtime? If you're not on the cloud, how big a deal is the possibility of service disruptions to you? Hit Comment and sound off.

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Huge AT&T 3G Outage in San Francisco Area

Microsoft Azure Shut Out Users Over Weekend - Should We Expect This from Cloud Computing?

Windows Azure logo courtesy of Code-Inside.de.