Your Survival Guy’s iPhone was impacted by yesterday’s nationwide cell service outage. I was able to use WiFi and the SOS function. We also have a landline. But it was a stark reminder of how much depends on our cell service working properly. With loved ones living away from home, it’s not a bad idea to communicate with them about these potential issues with communication. Your Survival Guy has been a longtime proponent of investing in a satellite phone, too.
After much speculation that the outage was caused by a cyber attack, AT&T has revealed that, in fact, it was a technical error at the company that took down the network. The company’s statement reads:
Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.
As a side note, for all those investors who check the prices for their trophy stocks all day long, this experience could have been a good lesson. It was shown in a 1980s experiment by Paul Andreassen, a psychologist at Columbia and Harvard, that investors who received frequent news updates on their stocks earned half the returns of investors who got no news at all. (Thank you for that, Jason Zweig). So perhaps some time without smartphones was helpful for investors.
Action Line: Most people have become reliant on smartphones, but the technology is still new and fragile despite being ubiquitous. Redundancies in your life are worth their weight in gold when they save you from disaster. Having a landline, satellite phone, radio, or even just getting to know your neighbors can have a big impact on your life when your cell phone goes down or the power goes out. Build redundancies into your life. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
