AT&T messaging system crashes

Surprising that we didn’t catch this news until today. Usually if something comes across the wires late Friday afternoon we have it prepared for Monday morning. This one, though, only caught us recently. It appears that AT&T had a national outage of its messaging services for a bout three hours on Friday. It happened during business hours, so while many personal cell users weren’t too agitated by the outage, business users were a bit outraged. And we totally understand; they pay for the service, and a three-hour outage for all messages is quite burdensome.

“Often everything goes through a single server, so if the mail server goes down, the whole network falls apart and you can’t get any messages out to anyone,” he said. Gold said he believes that consumer-oriented wireless operators don’t view messaging as “mission-critical” compared with voice. “It’s played second fiddle to the voice systems,” he said.

The “he” there is Jack Gold, president of a research firm focused on mobility and wireless. We find a number of problems with his assessment; none of which have to do with he himself. First, it appears that the network works like Christmas lights; if one part goes down, it all goes down. That sounds, we dunno, a little archaic. How servers still run this way is beyond us, but wethinks that AT&T ought to sink a bit of money into solving this aspect. Tech people, if we’re off base with this, let us know. Second, messaging plays second fiddle to voice systems? With the advent of the smart phone, messaging has become vital to businesses. Whether its a SMS or a full-length e-mail, these people rely on their messaging systems for quick communication. Entire relationships can crumble if this communication is broken down. So why not pay more attention to it, since we’re sure a great portion of AT&T’s revenues come from its business customers? Maybe we’re making too big a deal of it. But we just think that a three-hour full outage of messaging is a bit much. [eWeek]]]>