ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile Cellular Network Outage Nationwide early hours of Feb 22nd..... Relation to Solar Flares?

[Nick Marquez]

Almost no direct explanation for  the outage in my opinion has been given. Media coverage took hours to report, and then hours more before a press release gave solar flares as the cause. I have conformation that outages simultaneously spread across the country from South Carolina to Honolulu. Can anyone confirm this explanation as the cause? In the past few weeks the FBI has released several warnings regarding the very real possibility of an attack on  critical infrastructure including communications,  can anyone confirm recent solar flares were the cause of this unusual outage? Or was something nefarious, as the FBI warned at play here? The timing is pretty convenient and unsettling to say the least. My novice understanding is the MHz that could have potentially been affected would have been much lower than that used by cellular networks. 

 

Below are related press releases 

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/chinese-hackers-cisa-cyber-5-years-us-infrastructure-attack-rcna137706

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/fbi-and-cisa-warn-of-chinese-6017766/

https://www.newsweek.com/solar-flare-x-class-radio-blackouts-us-1872344

[Sam Warfel]

You are correct in that the frequency bands affected by flares and that of cell networks are quite different. Also, the outages occurred on the nightside of Earth, shielded from radio blackouts from flares. 
The timing is simply coincidental. 

[Misaka]

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/two-major-solar-flares-effects-cellular-networks-unlikely

[WA1ZJL]

First off hello.  Been following this site for over a year.  Coincidence I can't buy.  Obviously from FBI warnings someone has been waiting to do this deed.  Just be patient until a good flare comes and then blame it.  Don't worry about the facts.  Nighttime so there wouldn't be effects from the flare and the cell frequencies are too high to be affected by the flare anyway.  Just another attempt from the fearmongers.  

[Marcel de Bont]

Christian Harris from Space Weather Trackers made an excellent post on this he was kind enough to share with us.
https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/news/view/523/20240222-did-space-weather-really-knock-out-cell-phone-service-in-north-america.html

3 minuten geleden, WA1ZJL zei:

First off hello.  Been following this site for over a year.  Coincidence I can't buy.  Obviously from FBI warnings someone has been waiting to do this deed.  Just be patient until a good flare comes and then blame it.  Don't worry about the facts.  Nighttime so there wouldn't be effects from the flare and the cell frequencies are too high to be affected by the flare anyway.  Just another attempt from the fearmongers.  

So someone wanted to mess with your cell phone service for fearmongering? I'd say a technical issue is far more likely but it is not space weather related. That there were two X-class flares is just a coincidence. Like you said, it was night time and the cell frequencies are too high. 

[WA1ZJL]

Could either be technical coincidence as you mentioned or someone waiting for appropriate time to hack the network.  Using the flares is just another opportunity for folks to promote fear of processes on the sun that have been going on since the beginning.  I've seen several people on this site that came deathly afraid and you fine folks straightened them out.  Thanks for sharing your knowledge and I've been able to learn much here

[Bry]

We just had a X6.3 flare over the pacific ocean... the largest of SC25 ... despite being below cellular frequencies, would a solar flare of this magnitude close to being over the US affect communications?

[WA1ZJL]

Solar flares affect the ionosphere and change the way signals are refracted back to earth.  The stronger the flare the higher the frequencies affected.  Except in special conditions nothing above about 50 MHz uses the ionosphere for propagation.  Higher frequencies propagate by direct wave.  It's usually referred to as line of sight but there are other factors that enhance it a bit.  The only thing affected by flares are the lower frequencies that use the refraction of the ionosphere for long range communication.  Anything else is unaffected.

[Cronus]

Yeah, just a bunch of people trying to make false claims about some nonsense or whatever. Just terrorism messing with all the instruments. Definitely no greek gods or anything like that. 

[Crewman6]

Has anyone here read this article published by Italian scientists last year?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13358-z

I've been going over it with a fine tooth comb and all the other news about the flares and the outages yesterday, and I'm trying to understand if maybe this paper explains the issues we saw yesterday. I have a background in using various forms of radio equipment from my time as an air traffic controller in the Army, but I'm kind of at a roadblock trying to parse through all the information put out since yesterday. Obviously the flares themselves didn't cause the outages, but could the solar noise combined with a bad attempt to align the cell networks to deal with the interference be at fault?

Edited February 23 by Crewman6

[Sam Warfel]

Confirmation of a terrestrial cause of the cell outages: https://about.att.com/pages/network-update

[AScaredObserver]

BD is still adamant about this being the Sun's doing despite the contrary.

[Sam Warfel]

His opinions spring purely from the grifter’s motivations of personal gain from fearmongering and publicity, and should not be taken seriously.
I highly encourage you to avoid watching his content and supporting his lies.

[Misaka]

Unfortunately, in modern society, fake news always spreads better than corrections/fact checks or real news.

[Crewman6]

2 hours ago, Sam Warfel said:

Confirmation of a terrestrial cause of the cell outages: https://about.att.com/pages/network-update

Wouldn't really call that a complete confirmation. Just a "hey, this definitely wasn't a cyberattack, please don't start WW3 over it" notice. Could still be that they were trying to sort out the solar noise and made an oopsy, forgot to carry a one, and pushed out a bad solution.

[AScaredObserver]

I brought it up because the fact he had to do a follow up video hammering his point home proved he got it wrong.

[helios]

5 minutes ago, Crewman6 said:

Could still be that they were trying to sort out the solar noise and made an oopsy, forgot to carry a one, and pushed out a bad solution.

There were no radio emissions in that frequency range at all, the solar radio spectrum is observed 24/7 by numerous institutes, publicly accessible for example through e-callisto.

[Crewman6]

3 minutes ago, helios said:

There were no radio emissions in that frequency range at all, the solar radio spectrum is observed 24/7 by numerous institutes, publicly accessible for example through e-callisto.

Please refer to the paper I linked. I think it explores the topic in better language than I can at the moment, as I'm just coming off a 10 hour shift. 

[Philalethes]

51 minutes ago, Misaka said:

Unfortunately, in modern society, fake news always spreads better than corrections/fact checks or real news.

I believe this has been a common problem throughout the ages. As Swift wrote over 300 years ago:

«Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.»

[helios]

25 minutes ago, Crewman6 said:

Please refer to the paper I linked. I think it explores the topic in better language than I can at the moment, as I'm just coming off a 10 hour shift. 

The sun can cause radio emissions in the mobile phone spectrum, but it didn't. You can confirm this by looking at the e-callisto spectra. They are recorded using antennas pointed at the sun.
And furthermore, those emissions reach only the daylight side of the earth. The US was on the night-side during the big flares.
And furthermore there were no widespread outages reported on other parts of the planet, including those which were exposed to the sun.
There is really no plausible way that the sun could have been responsible for this outage.

By the way, during the 2003 halloween storms I was working as communication engineer and could first-handedly observe the influence of the eruptions on a satellite link. That's how I became interested in space weather.

[Crewman6]

On 2/24/2024 at 11:55 AM, helios said:

The sun can cause radio emissions in the mobile phone spectrum, but it didn't. You can confirm this by looking at the e-callisto spectra. They are recorded using antennas pointed at the sun.
And furthermore, those emissions reach only the daylight side of the earth. The US was on the night-side during the big flares.
And furthermore there were no widespread outages reported on other parts of the planet, including those which were exposed to the sun.
There is really no plausible way that the sun could have been responsible for this outage.

By the way, during the 2003 halloween storms I was working as communication engineer and could first-handedly observe the influence of the eruptions on a satellite link. That's how I became interested in space weather.

I understand that, however, that paper seems to argue that there are other forms of solar noise generated that propogate differently than the typical solar flare interference that has been wrongly blamed for the outages. The way I understand it, the solar noise reflects and refracts in such a way that it overloads links between base stations and individual equipment. Additionally, it does state that this effect is not necessarily limited to the dayside of the planet. I would suggest looking at the paper itself, because again, I'm not the scientists that studied this or published this paper, but I think there may be something to it, i.e. the X flares the night before the outages may have caused ATT to react and their reaction may have been to push out a bad "patch" [for lack of better term] to resolve the solar noise by realigning their network to deal with that solar noise, creating a domino effect of sorts. 

[Philalethes]

17 minutes ago, Crewman6 said:

it does state that this effect is not necessarily limited to the dayside of the planet

There's not a whole lot of evidence for that in the paper itself though. For the flare they treat in detail there only seems to be any noticeable noise close to noon.

Personally I don't believe it had anything to do with it at all; while it's a coherent story, it still seems too implausible, and I don't really see why one would reasonably reach for such a speculative notion without any clear evidence for it on the side of what actually happened to the network. If any such evidence were to ever surface I'd gladly accept it, but until then I'd keep assuming it was some totally unrelated error on the side of AT&T and that it was just coincidence that it happened in close temporal proximity with the flares.

Due to our propensity for finding connections, humans are notoriously bad at intuitively predicting true rates of coincidences that simply occur due to sheer statistical inevitability, as seen readily from fundamental cognitive biases like the clustering illusion. Thus we are prone to convincing ourselves that coincidences aren't just that.

That's not to say it's not possible for there to actually have been a connection, but as mentioned above I'm personally definitely going to need to see some clear evidence for it before I believe that.

[Parabolic]

30 minutes ago, Crewman6 said:

I understand that, however, that paper seems to argue that there are other forms of solar noise generated that propogate differently than the typical solar flare interference that has been wrongly blamed for the outages. The way I understand it, the solar noise reflects and refracts in such a way that it overloads links between base stations and individual equipment. Additionally, it does state that this effect is not necessarily limited to the dayside of the planet. I would suggest looking at the paper itself, because again, I'm not the scientists that studied this or published this paper, but I think there may be something to it, i.e. the X flares the night before the outages may have caused ATT to react and their reaction may have been to push out a bad "patch" [for lack of better term] to resolve the solar noise by realigning their network to deal with that solar noise, creating a domino effect of sorts. 

It's a known fact that X-ray emissions from the sun only effect the day side of the earth and to me that already debunks any new hypothesis that came from that particular event. Even in the most extreme events (R5 radio blackouts) a flare would barely have an effect on night side satellite navigation. All three X-flares weren't very spectacular in anyway, the x6.3 was only the largest of this SC but that's the only part worth mentioning.

[helios]

However, the argument was not that x-rays caused the disruptions, but solar radio emissions.

But I also don't find any reference in this paper how solar radio noise could reach the night side.

But for the sake of completeness; There are ways how solar radio emissions could hypothetically reach the night side, but none of them could disturb a mobile cell network:
- Frequencies below about 30 MHz (Type-I, II and III emissions) can sneak underneath the ionosphere at the terminator and be ducted to the night side. Mobile networks don't use these frequencies.
- Reflections on the moon; Solar radio emissions can bounce off the moon and reach the night side. The attenuation compared to the direct path is huge. Before it could be even noticeable on the night side, it would cause severe problems on the dayside.