Rick & Co. my wife attempted unsuccessfully to place a call through our long distance carrier at around 1P.M. today (pacific) after repeated attempts she contacted the operator and was told that there had been and incident at some telecom facility that had disrupted long distance comunication to some extent- worldwide! Our carrier is Execuline located in Sacramento Ca.. So I called Pacific Bell a few minutes later and got the same story; they would not identify the responsible organization, or say whether it was satellite related, but did indicate that they had no info on when the problem would be resolved,they also mentioned they were used to handling similar problems within a local area but had never experienced anything this wide spread.I'm not a phone or power guy, I'm a firefighter, but I thought it might interest you folks, has anyone else picked up on this?

-- Anonymous, May 24, 1999

Answers

Ya got me, Chris. I placed a call to Dublin, Ireland about 1PM EST today (5/24/1999); no problems, went right through on the first try. Didn't see anything on the national news tonight, either (I would think something like this would make CNN or one of the big three).

-- Anonymous, May 24, 1999

Oh - I forgot something - I'm on the phone half the day talking to someone on one coast or the other or somewhar inbetween - and no problems with any of my domestic LD calls today, either.

-- Anonymous, May 24, 1999

Chris, there are a couple of NANUs (sounds like something Mork from Ork said, huh?) stating a GPS satellite will be out of service, one for 5/17 and the other for 5/25. Nothing about the day you're mentioning, so it looks like whatever the problem was, it wasn't a planned satellite maintenance outage.

For anyone curious, NANUs are Notice Advisories to Navstar (GPS) Users.

-- Anonymous, May 24, 1999

Interestingly, if you read the reports, the outages for those dates are where they are taking a single satellite offline, and testing it for EOW and Y2K issues.

But I thought that they had already stated that GPS satellites were Y2K compliant. Why the test now?

We talked about this issue on c.s.y-2k a couple weeks ago...

Jon

-- Anonymous, May 24, 1999