[outages] Verizon Wireless Calls to NY/CT/NJ fail [RETRACTION]

[Peter Beckman]

RETRACTION: this is not actually an outage.

TL;DR: A Verizon Rep lied to me that my issue was due to a non-existent
outage, and my issue was I was dialing an International number rather than
a US number due to an iOS 10 bug.

DETAILS:

The issue was caused by a bug with the new iOS 10. I have a colleague who is
living in Austria, and I have three phone numbers associated with their contact
entry.  Two are US-based, one is Austria-based.

Before I updated iOS, my Favorites entry was set to call this colleague at
their US number, which forwards behind the scenes to Austria, so I don't
need to have International calling on my mobile.

However, it looks like iOS reverted the favorite entry to the Austria
number, which is why I got that error message. And now trying to get it to set
the correct phone number again in iOS, I am unable to -- it defaults to the
Austria number, thus my belief that this is a bug in iOS.

When I dialed the NJ number manually, the number I BELIEVED I was dialing,
the call went through without issue.

SO the issue was a bug in iOS which mistakenly led me to believe I was
calling a US number, but was calling Austria number instead.

MY MISTAKE!!

Though I blame Apple partially. And another red herring: I lost the ability
to connect to Verizon towers yesterday until I updated to iOS 10.0.2. I
thought that this issue might be related to that. Nope.

MY LARGER ISSUE -- Why was I lied to by a Verizon Wireless Representative???

     I spoke to Customer Service Agent Megan, said she had worked there for 7 years.

     I dialed *611 at 10:41am EDT, call lasted 11 minutes. Asked for "Customer
     Service" and then "Network issues" and was routed to Megan.

     She stated that customers in NY, NJ and CT (and possibly others) were being
 	affected by a network upgrade (LTE Enhanced-related) that started at 9pm on
 	Monday and they were not able to call out, and customers in those areas
 	were being advised to reboot their phones to see if they would connect to a
 	different tower.

     She then stated that calls TO those areas might result in the specific
     message that I was hearing, that stated:

         Welcome to Verizon Wireless. Long Distance or International Dialing is
         not included with your service. To inquire about Long Distance or
         International Dialing, hang up and dial *611 from your wireless phone.
         Announcement 7 Location 117137

     I'm still getting that message. And now I know why, and it sure isn't
     the reason she stated.

I hope Verizon can figure out why I was lied to by their representative.

Beckman

On Tue, 27 Sep 2016, Peter Beckman wrote:

> Verizon Wireless: I called a phone in NJ this morning, got a strange message:
>
>    "Welcome to Verizon Wireless. Long Distance or International Dialing is
>     not included with your service. To inquire about Long Distance or
>     International Dialing, hang up and dial *611 from your wireless phone.
>     Announcement 7 Location 117137"
>
> I called Verizon Wireless support and they are saying that due to some
> upgrades relating to LTE Advanced/Enhanced, since 9pm last night customers
> in those areas may not be able to make calls, and calls on Verizon Wireless
> TO these areas will get this misleading message.
>
> I was able to make calls to other non-local numbers without issue.
>
> Has anyone heard more about this? Can't find much on the web about it.
>
> The outage map shows a lot of complaints in and through the east coast
> corridor between DC and NYC, even toward Boston.
>
>    http://downdetector.com/status/verizon/map/
>
> Beckman
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
> beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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