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from the call-for-help-go-unconnected dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage
911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center.
The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”
In a tweet, the telecoms giant said it was “working tirelessly” to get its affected systems back up and running.
CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.
In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.
Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @03:28AM (7 children)
Most people with crypto also have some gold/silver/etc that has a long history of being used as money. The (majority of) people who do whatever the government tells them will be in a pickle though, so there should be some plan for helping them.
(Score: 3, Touché) by sjames on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:22AM (6 children)
The local grocery store is unlikely to take gold or silver during an outage. I doubt they even know where to get a suitable scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:41AM (5 children)
Its mostly in the form of coins of known weight... and most grocery stores have a scale to weight vegetables and meat and such.
(Score: 2) by danaris on Saturday December 29 2018, @02:45PM
As I understand it, such scales would be unlikely to have the precision required for the weighing of the amounts of gold necessary to pay for reasonable-sized grocery trips.
And that's assuming that standard weights of coins had even been set. That seems like the kind of thing that would take months at least, and the establishment of some more local governmental system to oversee them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @04:05PM (2 children)
Most grocery stores sell digital scales of reasonable (+/- .01 gram) accuracy, and have business-grade scales for counting cash in the office that are even more accurate. Not sure what you level of accuracy is needed to weigh precious metals fairly, but I'm willing to bet they have it.
(Score: 2) by Kalas on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:28PM
Where the fuck do you live that you can just grab a scale accurate to 10mg at Walmart or whatnot?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:29PM
Cash is not counted with a scale. They use something like this [amazon.com].
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 29 2018, @10:25PM
At best, those scales weigh to the nearest 1/8 oz. Based on today's price, that's plus or minus $160. Even if you shop for a month's worth of groceries, that's too much variance.
Who is going to standardize the weight and purity of the coins? In p[articular, who is going to do it during a two week (or so) communications outage?
Stick to folding green. It's already standardized and cheerfully accepted by every retailer.