Seriously, what were they thinking?
By Minda Zetlin
What would you do if a failure by your company disrupted the lives of millions of people, and put millions more into potential danger by disabling emergency response systems? I'm guessing your first response wouldn't be to publicly say how wonderful your company is. Unless you were CenturyLink. The seventh largest telecom provider in the U.S. has done little more than brag since its more-than-24-hour-long outage began early Thursday morning.
The outage had real consequences. It spread right across the country, from New York to California. It knocked out 911 services in at least five states, Arizona, Washington, Idaho, Missouri, and Massachusetts. In Boston, a man whose house was on fire was unable to phone for help, and wound up pulling an old-fashioned 1852-era fire alarm on his street. Fortunately, that system was still operational and it sent a Morse code signal to the local fire department, which arrived and put out the fire.