This is the very first post I made on GAW almost 2 years ago. Given today's cell phone outages, the following can again shed light on WHY I believe these outages are occurring.

I work as a telecom engineer troubleshooting/programming the Ciena 5164 optical router used for Verizon and At&t. These companies and many of my colleagues know exactly what it was but the more interesting part that raised some eyebrows was the fact that cc payment processing and emergency services/SOS/911 calls WERE possible for most of the affected customers. This is key. (This all runs on the same fiber optic network and should have been ‘down’ also.)
NOTE: If your phone signal meter says SOS, you CAN call 911.

I cannot overstate how anomalous the above fact pattern is because when our networks go down, they don’t go down in this piecemeal way.
Here’s the takeaway:
The goal of a ‘cyber weapon’ is maximum disruption.
But (IMO) this in NOT a weapon but a cyber tool.
Whoever deployed (tested) this ‘cyber tool’ went to great lengths to pause specific categories of communication ONLY.
This surgeon scalpel approach we saw was a MUCH more difficult task than to just ‘nuke’ the whole system so to speak. A tool like this would need to be tested a few times to ensure a reliable partitioning of the ‘Target’ [calls/data] and the ‘Not Target’ [911/cc processing].

All of these phone/data/911 services run on the exact same network. There is no secret back up or auxiliary.
The network is quasi redundant but the very nature of how it's laid out (to a degree) because if one node goes down, data can be routed around that node, etc.

To be clear:
When new, normal configs are put into an optical router and everything seems to be done properly, a period of several minutes to a few hours may be necessary to make sure the node is operating properly.
The point I'm trying to drive home here is at these systems can be EXTREMELY FINICKY when you make changes.

There are hundreds of thousands of 12+ year old fiber optic routers running right now in the USA handling a mind-boggling amount of cellular data/traffic that.
IF one where to be brought off-line for just a few minutes by a tech and then we tried to bring the router back up and put cellular/data traffic on that router again, it's not unusual for it too require 30+ minutes or more of troubleshooting bs to get the router to come back up and do what it had just been doing, uninterrupted, for the last decade until just a few mins prior.
That's the specific nature of the fickleness of these machines.
IF it works fine for a day, it should work flawlessly for a decade… BUT a hypothetical cyber tool such as this MUST be tested before you can know for sure that the network is going to behave as (WH) intend it to.

BUT WHY?

Enemy sleeper cells need reliable Comms for max effectiveness.
Q2056: "It must be hard to communicate."
u/#q2056

WWG1WGA!