I was one of those people with the dead iphone yesterday. It wasn’t totally dead, I could use the wifi to do things, I just couldn’t make phone calls. Which actually, was a good thing. I don’t like talking on the phone. I prefer texting, which was working.
I woke up early and looked at the phone and I saw some messages regarding my cartoons had popped up on the screen. When people comment, it alerts me. The top comment said something like, “Phone hack.” It was on a cartoon that had nothing to do with a phone or a hack, so I checked the phone again and saw the SOS at the top of the phone where the signal bars should be.
I went to a website and it wouldn’t load and I tried other things and the same thing. I panicked. Was my phone hacked? How was that done? When I went to bed the night before, all was well. If I hadn’t seen that “phone hack” comment, I would not have thought much of the whole situation.
For about an hour I tried everything, I downloaded the latest update and I looked up things on google and You Tube, using my computer. I tried this, I tried that, I tried everything, panicking for an hour.
I’m usually good at fixing electronic or internet problems, but nothing worked.
I then thought that it could be AT&T and not just my phone, but of course I couldn’t call AT&T since the phone was down.
I turned on the 6 am news and there it was – it was a national outage! Phew. Relieved.
I made it through the early morning calmly then, since I knew there was nothing I could do. And before 8 am, the phone was back up to it’s usual self. I suspect many people slept through the whole thing. While many of us went crazy in the dark, needlessly. First world problems.
Someone posted this image on Twitter with the tagline, “AT&T customers this morning.”
I wondered about things like Apple Pay or using the phone’s boarding pass option at the airport. I’ve seen articles that say to download the boarding pass at home or print it out at the airport, rather than just have the app passport, and now that makes sense.
And what about the NY subway, where it’s “tap and pay” with the OMNY system? Will lines back up at the vending machines with people buying metro cards if this ever happens midday?
Also, of course, have cash or credit cards if you are an “only apple pay” user or other tap and pay users, which I suspect many Gen Z users are.
Receive an email each time I publish a blog post by clicking here