Maine Cell Phone Users: Never Use 911 to See if Your Phone Works

The outage never seemed to hit my own phone yesterday.

I saw online in several places, that there was a pretty widespread cellular outage for a few of the big companies like AT&T and Verizon. I didn't even really know much about it until it was pretty much over. But it reminded me of when the internet went out all over the country back in 2020, and no one knew what to do. It was board games galore for a whole afternoon and evening, like the good old days.

It was like the whole world shut down for a minute. Granted in those earlier days of the pandemic, the internet was most people's lifeline to the outside world. It was only down for a few hours, but it was like the 1800's all of a sudden. Yesterday proved we haven't really gotten the hang of all this digital stuff in emergencies.

People were actually calling 911 to see why their phones weren't working.

Can you imagine? The only time in my life I ever called 911, my neighbor across the hall was screaming for help, and I dialed it super quick. But that's it. I've never used it for anything else, ever. I always figured that 911 was a sacred number, only used in dire situations.

But according to Newsweek, many people all over, were flooding their local emergency response centers with 911 calls trying to figure out what was going on. In fact, many of the people who called were simply trying to verify they could simply call 911, almost out of curiosity. Others were concerned there was an emergency.

But police departments were putting the word out as quickly as possible yesterday, trying to get people to stop calling unless it was an actual emergency. No one seems quite sure why there was such a widespread outage, although conspiracy theories abound online. As of today, things seem pretty much back to normal. But yeah... please never call 911 to see if your phones work. It's just the worst thing you can do.

The outage wasn't likely weather related, but I bet if any of these things happened now, it would all go out again immediately...