Verizon outage in Southern California?

Tue Oct 18 20:12:53 UTC 2005

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 12:59:37 -0700
  Steve Sobol <sjsobol at JustThe.net> wrote:
> 
> Olsen, Jason wrote:
> 
>>>Anyone have more information?  It seems to have started around 02:30 local 
>>>time this morning.
>> 
>> We lost connectivity (WAN/Internet/POTS) to our Long Beach site at
>> around 2:27 AM PDT today.  Several news agencies are reporting it on the
>> web (hooray news.google.com), citing "mechanical glitches" or bad
>> weather.
> 
> Bad weather could definitely be a factor.
> 
> Southern Cali electric utilities are notoriously unreliable during bad 
>weather, especially up in my neck of the woods. It's been raining pretty 
>steadily here for the past two days; I drove 150 miles from Apple Valley to 
>northeast San Diego this morning and it was even raining down here in SD -- 
>may still be raining now, I just haven't looked outside. I even heard a 
>radio report that a funnel cloud touched down in the foothills outside Los 
>Angeles; I forget exactly where. (That doesn't happen very often around 
>here.)

While weather in Southern California may affect your electricity,
it has only a minor effect in the Long Beach area. Monday evening's
storm was fairly mild with winds under 10 MPH and less than a half
an inch of rain overnight. Not what I would consider a heavy storm.

Rains do cause telco data problems. When I had dial-up, my maximum
rate dropeed from about 45K to 37Kbps during and for a day or two
following rain.

Telephone service is beginning to be restored in the Long Beach
area but is still sporadic.

Around 2:20 or 2:30 a.m., I was awoken by my clock radio with
three or more sets of soft buzzing noises--as though a radio
station went silent. I checked my cordless phone and had
dialtone, then went back to sleep. Is there any correlation?

matthew black
e-mail postmaster
california state university, long beach