The First Post!

First post! Yippie! Okay, so I've picked the article, Newspaper seeks public records on 911 system outage from AT&T, from the Texas Watchdog. The article says that AT&T's 911 system, a publicly funded system, experienced approximately 4 hours of outage in Cameron County, leaving many people without their normal methods of contacting the emergency services. AT&T claimed that no problems were caused by the outage. However, according to the article, there were several missed emergency calls and one medical call due to the outage. AT&T claims that this was the result of a system error. The paper, the Brownsville Herald, is calling for the release of records from AT&T to show what actually happened, claiming that AT&T is a public company in this regard because the funding for the 911 system comes from taxpayer money.


I strongly agree that they should release their records, as this was a very dangerous occurrence. I think that the article is very important, as it underlines two things. First, in the digital age, we are relying on an increasingly small number of companies for an increasingly large number of things. If one of them fails, we are all in trouble. Second, these companies are not transparent, so we, many times, do not know what is going on with them. This is worrisome.