On June 22, with most of the nation quarantined and watching anxiously as demonstrations troubled the cities, one circuit in the Southwest failed.
That took down a fiber provider, which overloaded T-Mobile's network. And that took down voice and data for all its customers. For 13 hours.
That started a rumor of a cyberattack.
Then, as customers across the country complained on social media, sites like Downdetector threw up scary maps of mass outages.
An alien invasion? Maybe the NSA was shutting down communication? Was it Antifa? Were the Russians coming? Or maybe China?
None of those things. It was that bad circuit.
T-Mobile eventually said engineers were working all night to solve the problem.
The resulting false posts and crazy memes sparked something of a panic.
According to ClaimsJournal, the situation exposed a critical shortcoming in the nation's information grid. No central site gives information about outages.
Sites like Downdetector are helpful, but they rely, in part, on data gleaned from social media.
