talkingDigital

When you are a computer guy, you know when the Internet is out somewhere. Calls come in all at once.

Last night, I was mini-golfing with my kids and my cell phone buzzed. It was a friend informing me that their Bresnan Internet and phone service wasn’t working. I had them do the usual modem and router reset. That didn’t fix the problem, so I blamed Bresnan and told them to wait it out. As I was hanging up, my call waiting went off – it was someone 20 miles away from the previous caller with exactly the same problem. I blamed Bresnan and answered the next call waiting call.

I walked the last few holes so that I could talk on my cell phone to comfort people during their time of loss.

As soon as the calls stopped coming in, I opened up my Twitter application on my Palm Pre. Remember, the Pre multi-tasks, so I also opened up the web and went to Bresnan’s homepage. There was nothing about the outage on the Bresnan site.

A Twitter search for Bresnan revealed the span of the problem immediately. Montana, parts of Utah and Colorado Bresnan customers were all down. It appears that everywhere Bresnan services was down.

Bresnan’s television service was working great, however, there was no banner running across the bottom of any of the channels notifying customers that Bresnan was having problems. Keep in mind that a big percentage of Bresnan customers subscribe through their “Triple Play” package which provides Internet, TV and Phone service. Last night, only their television service was working.

I tried to call all of the local TV stations (by now it was 10:30pm and the local news airing live). There was no answer on their emergency news tip lines. I called a few friends who worked for news stations, but none of the stations reported the problem while they were live on the air.

While I struggled to find details from Bresnan and TV news, I was notifying and helping hundreds of people cope with their outage via Twitter. It only took a few seconds on Twitter to realize that this was a big problem. But, Bresnan and most of the local news services don’t have Twitter accounts. I imagine they think that Twitter is just a fad where people text what they are eating for lunch.

A Google news search this morning reveals two news stories about the outage. Neither writer realized that the outage went beyond their local coverage.

This is why talkingDigital exists. We are not a news site. However, we track and comment on the technology news that affects the average human – geek or nongeek alike.