What we should all be asking ourselves after today's mysterious cellular outage



Many Americans across the country woke up on Thursday morning without cell service — but there’s still no explanation for what caused the outage.

The most affected were AT&T customers with 50,000 outages officially reported at 7 a.m. EST, but some Verizon and T-Mobile customers were affected as well.

Now, Americans are left wondering whether or not it was a solar flare or a massive cyberattack — especially considering just yesterday there was a cyber attack on the cellular systems in Israel.

This was a small taste of what life would be like after such an attack, but a bigger attack could have devastating effects.

“One Second After” author William Forstchen has been warning about this for years.

“If you saw the number of attacks, incoming attacks on our infrastructure, on our military, it’s unrelenting,” Forstchen tells Glenn Beck. “This is just a foretaste of the future,” adding that we should be prepared for a cyber attack.

“Cyber attacks could include our water system, our electrical grid,” Glenn says, asking Forstchen how widespread this could be.

“It could be targeted to a specific or in a general offensive, like what I would call a first strike scenario,” Forstchen says. “For example, take where you are, suppose water all across the board was shut down for 48 hours because that’s all electronically controlled.”

“Would be very bad within 24 to 48 hours,” he adds.

“If you lose electricity, that’s the fundamental building block,” he continues. “Then everything goes. Water, food, medical, all of it.”


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Americans across the country are experiencing drops in cell service, in some cases hindering 911 calls



Tens of thousands of Americans awoke Thursday morning to discover their cell phones were bereft of signal. In addition to being unable to touch base with friends, families, and coworkers, some users apparently were unable to hail 911.

While those affected by the cascading cellular service outages appear to be predominantly AT&T customers, clients of other service providers are reportedly experiencing issues.

Around 3 a.m., there was a spike in reports of AT&T outages on the website Downdetector. As of 9:02 a.m. ET, there were over 73,000 reporters of customers experiencing service issues.

While Verizon, T-Mobile and other providers similarly saw spikes, Downdetector indicated they were orders of magnitude smaller. Verizon and T-Mobile maintain that their networks were unaffected and operating normally.

A spokesman for T-Mobile told CBS News, "Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks."

"Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier," Verizon said in a statement obtained by the New York Times. "We are continuing to monitor the situation."

While AT&T has confirmed that it is experiencing rampant outages, it failed to provide an explanation for why the failure occurred in the first place, reported CNN.

"Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them," the company said in a statement. "We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored."

A spokesman for the company indicated further that AT&T's first responder network nevertheless remains operational.

The outages prompted some speculation online about possibly wicked causes, such as an electromagnetic pulse strike or a cyberattack; however, an industry source who spoke to CNN under the condition of anonymity suggested the issue is likely linked to a process known as peering, whereby cellphone services pass off calls from one network to the next.

CNN noted that the company was experiencing sporadic outages earlier this week, including a drop in 911 service in various southeastern states.

Blaze News reached out to AT&T for comment on the extent and cause of the outages as well as a projected timeline on a remedy but did not immediately receive a reply.

Various municipalities and local authorities across the country have confirmed the outages, in some cases highlighting corresponding difficulties reaching first responders by phone.

The City of Upper Arlington in Ohio noted that outages were affecting fire alarms, such that first responders "may not be notified of an activation." The city advised residents to follow up alarms with a 911 call "for the foreseeable future."

The San Francisco Fire Department noted that while the San Francisco 911 center was still operational, 911 calls had reportedly been impacted for some customers.

Various other official channels, including the X accounts for the City of Little Rock, Arkansas, the Rockville City Police Department of Maryland, and Orlando Police Department in Florida noted similar difficulties. A common recommendation: Use family or friends as proxies for 911 calls or call from a landline.

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Biden Praises Verizon, AT&T For Agreeing To Delay 5G Deployment

Another delay...

Report: Verizon Peddles Racism And Leftist Propaganda In Anti-American ‘Social Justice’ Curriculum

Verizon is using its 'Race & Social Justice' initiatives, which kicked off shortly after the death of George Floyd in May 2020, to push critical race theory and other leftist propaganda on its employees.

Former top Facebook official argues conservative content should be deplatformed: 'Extremely radical'



A former top official at Facebook openly declared Sunday that television service providers should stop airing conservative content, citing TV networks like One America News and Newsmax.

Speaking on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook, essentially argued that telecommunications giants like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon need to censor right-leaning content.

In fact, Stamos outright said, "We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences," citing right-wing YouTubers who have larger audiences than "daytime CNN."

"They are extremely radical, and pushing extremely radical views," Stamos claimed.

"It is up to the Facebooks and YouTubes, in particular, to think about whether or not they want to be effectively cable networks for disinformation," Stamos continued.

"And then we have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem that these companies have freedom of speech, but I'm not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such to be bringing them into tens of millions of homes. This is allowing people to seek out information if they really want to, but not pushing it into their faces I think is really where we're going to have to go here," the former top Facebook official said.

Earlier in the interview, Stamos explained the advent of the information age, bringing with it massive social media platforms, has created an environment of echo-chambers, where people can selectively choose to consume only information that confirms their narratives, while ignoring any information that contradicts what they believe.

Stamos claimed such an environment provides an incentive for media companies to "become more and more radical."

"One of the places you can see this is on the fact that you now have competitors to Fox News on their right, OANN and Newsmax, which are carried by all the major cable networks, who are trying now to outflank Fox [News] on the right because the moment Fox introduced any kind of realism into their reporting, immediately a bunch of people chose to put themselves into a sealed ecosystem," Stamos said. "They can do that both on cable. They can do it online, and that becomes a huge challenge in figuring out how do you bring people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us back into the same consensual reality."

Interestingly, Stamos did not say that left-leaning content or liberal media companies should be targeted, despite their culpability in helping drive political tribalism.

Former Facebook insider Alex Stamos tells @brianstelter: "We have to turn down the capability of these Conservative… https://t.co/7BhDJx5mIo
— Daily Caller (@Daily Caller)1610906976.0

Buzzfeed to acquire HuffPost in Verizon deal

Under the terms of the deal, Verizon will maintain a minority stake in HuffPost and will make a cash investment in Buzzfeed.