PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Mass cellphone outage sparks fear of communications, electric grid failure.
Thursday’s sporadic interruption of national cellular phone networks has raised new concerns about how a large solar flare event or an atmospheric nuclear attack could shut down a wider network of phones or even the electric grid.
While the number of phone outages was small, they showed up coast to coast, and some media spun the story up into a major crisis. “World Is Ending,” screamed the Drudge Report in a red headline.
Early indications are that it could have been caused by successive solar flares big enough to interrupt cellular service but not affect the electric grid.
Early on I was hearing it was hackers, but whatever.