6 ms·

I'm going to piggy-back on this about a certain way information may not add up. I live in Boston, and so do my siblings. We all worked downtown. On the day of t

I'm going to piggy-back on this about a certain way information may not add up. I live in Boston, and so do my siblings. We all worked downtown. On the day of the marathon bombing, I immediately called my sister on her cell phone to see if she was okay. Someone that was not my sister picked up, then immediatly hung up after I said who I was looking for. I was immediately terrified. What if my sister had been hurt, dropped her phone, and it was now in the hands of an opportunistic lowlife? But no. That wasn't it at all. It was instead, that the overloaded cell network, instead of just failing to connect my call, instead, misconnected it. That was a failure mode I had not predicted. In the end, all my people were fine. But I was shaken. And of course, many other people were not fine.

Noctem 7y ago
Wow, I've never heard of that happening. If anyone knows, I'd love to hear a technical explanation of how and why that could occur.
- tru3_power 7y ago
  Yea seriously. Seems like something that could potentially be abused to intercept calls.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  I don't have a technical explanation, but I had a few weirdly misconnected calls and even a call that changed to another person in the middle of a call in the analog cell phone days.
  - reitanqild 7y ago
    Back when I grew up there would sometimes be some steange noises or eerie silence or something when we was on the phone. We used to joke that "they are just listening in", but I guess no one believed that except possibly my mum. (There wasn't much interesting going on.)
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    Way easier to happen on the old analog phone systems, when an unreliable relay would not react, or randomly flip. With digital networks and all their checksums and error detection, it's not become impossible, but at least you'd much much more likely just get a dropped detection or other "unreliability" fault than being connected to someone else.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  I don't have a technical explanation for how call misrouting can happen except to observe that the endpoints are entirely reliant on the network to get this right, they don't even tell each other "Hi I'm X trying to call Y" and "Hi I'm Y answering a call from X". On Strowger electro-mechanical exchanges one of the nice features is that a random piece of the exchange handles each dialed call. This means the human intuitive approach of "Huh, that didn't work, I'll hang up and try again" actually had a pretty good chance of success if the problem is an electrical fault or something rather than you wrote the number down incorrectly. I did have a morning once where every call I received was for a business in a Welsh village (I live in England) and the callers were as confused as I was that they'd reached a personal mobile phone instead. The problem resolved itself before it made me annoyed rather than confused.
  - Agentlien 7y ago
    I have a friend who, for a few months, had a really strange thing going on with his phone. Any time his phone was off, calls to him would be redirected to someone else. It was another person from the same city, but using a different carrier. Me, my friend and other friends of his called both companies to report the error multiple times. All we received was scorn and disbelief. We were told, repeatedly, that it simply couldn't happen. But it did, consistently. It felt really silly when it got to the stage where I'd call my friend, someone else picked up and I'd go "Oh, hi, it's me again". One day, it just stopped happening.
    - NullPrefix 7y ago
      Did he check if call forwarding was activated?
      - Agentlien 7y ago
        According to customer service it wasn't and they said they didn't allow it anyway to that other company's network. And hence, they didn't believe us when we said it was happening. This was circa 2006
    - 7y ago
- garaetjjte 7y ago
  Maybe usage of non-ECC RAM on servers?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 7y ago
Overloaded, stressed, and/or damaged systems often act unpredictably. What precipitated the mis-routing is an interesting question. Perhaps multiple devices switching in/out of a particular cell or node faster than the routing system could accommodate?
toomanybeersies 7y ago
I'm sure someone more qualified and experienced with phone networks can chip in, but from memory this is by design on the phone network, when it gets overloaded it just starts to connect randomly to reduce load. I can't remember exact details, because it's not my area of expertise, but I vaguely remember my father (who's a telecommunications network engineer) talking about it years ago.
- simonh 7y ago
  That doesn’t seem to make sense on the face of it. Connecting to the wrong number doesn’t reduce load, because the network still has to carry the call. Why not just fail to connect? I know you’re not a network engineer, but it just doesn’t look right.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    Well it could reduce load if making a call is a much more expensive than a connected call. If the call, fails, I’ll try calling back and so will others. If I’m connected, I first need to establish comms with the person on the other end and determine it’s a misconmection before I can hang up and try again.
    - simonh 7y ago
      That's not the case though, the networks are all bandwidth constrained and connecting a call consumes negligible bandwidth. I'm not a radio or network engineer, but I used to work with them supporting cellular network panning software so I'm familiar with some aspects of the technology.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Yes that does odd - I do know the UK the mobile network is designed so that in case of major emergencies you can shutdown access for subs (normal users) and keep it up for emergency services etc.
staticautomatic 7y ago
I got misconnected once while trying to book a hotel reservation over the phone. Rooms became available 330 days out but a whole month at once, so when the reservation office opened at 8am or whatever on the first of the month, everyone would try to call in. So many people were calling this number that the system would start hanging up on people at random, so you'd just call back over and over hoping that you'd get connected when the phones went live. Finally, someone on the other end said "Hello?" and I said "Hi, I'd like to book a room for next summer" and he said "Me too" and I said "good luck!" and hung up.
- whamlastxmas 7y ago
  What hotel is this that people go to such lengths to book?
  - alexhutcheson 7y ago
    This is pretty common for big events, especially in smaller metros that don't have a huge amount of hotel capacity: Conventions, college football games, college graduations, etc.
  - staticautomatic 7y ago
    The Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park.
Steve44 7y ago
About 20 years ago I was following a friend in a car and we ended up a few cars apart. I called his mobile and just said “which way are we going at the roundabout”. The person on the other end was very confused, it wasn’t my friend but the car directly in front of me. I’ve no idea how that happened but was incredibly bizarre and I think the other driver was more freaked out than I was.

Noctem 7y ago

Wow, I've never heard of that happening. If anyone knows, I'd love to hear a technical explanation of how and why that could occur.

tru3_power 7y ago
Yea seriously. Seems like something that could potentially be abused to intercept calls.
cameldrv 7y ago
I don't have a technical explanation, but I had a few weirdly misconnected calls and even a call that changed to another person in the middle of a call in the analog cell phone days.
- reitanqild 7y ago
  Back when I grew up there would sometimes be some steange noises or eerie silence or something when we was on the phone. We used to joke that "they are just listening in", but I guess no one believed that except possibly my mum. (There wasn't much interesting going on.)
- anyfoo 7y ago
  Way easier to happen on the old analog phone systems, when an unreliable relay would not react, or randomly flip. With digital networks and all their checksums and error detection, it's not become impossible, but at least you'd much much more likely just get a dropped detection or other "unreliability" fault than being connected to someone else.
tialaramex 7y ago
I don't have a technical explanation for how call misrouting can happen except to observe that the endpoints are entirely reliant on the network to get this right, they don't even tell each other "Hi I'm X trying to call Y" and "Hi I'm Y answering a call from X". On Strowger electro-mechanical exchanges one of the nice features is that a random piece of the exchange handles each dialed call. This means the human intuitive approach of "Huh, that didn't work, I'll hang up and try again" actually had a pretty good chance of success if the problem is an electrical fault or something rather than you wrote the number down incorrectly. I did have a morning once where every call I received was for a business in a Welsh village (I live in England) and the callers were as confused as I was that they'd reached a personal mobile phone instead. The problem resolved itself before it made me annoyed rather than confused.
- Agentlien 7y ago
  I have a friend who, for a few months, had a really strange thing going on with his phone. Any time his phone was off, calls to him would be redirected to someone else. It was another person from the same city, but using a different carrier. Me, my friend and other friends of his called both companies to report the error multiple times. All we received was scorn and disbelief. We were told, repeatedly, that it simply couldn't happen. But it did, consistently. It felt really silly when it got to the stage where I'd call my friend, someone else picked up and I'd go "Oh, hi, it's me again". One day, it just stopped happening.
  - NullPrefix 7y ago
    Did he check if call forwarding was activated?
    - Agentlien 7y ago
      According to customer service it wasn't and they said they didn't allow it anyway to that other company's network. And hence, they didn't believe us when we said it was happening. This was circa 2006
  - 7y ago
garaetjjte 7y ago
Maybe usage of non-ECC RAM on servers?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 7y ago

Overloaded, stressed, and/or damaged systems often act unpredictably. What precipitated the mis-routing is an interesting question. Perhaps multiple devices switching in/out of a particular cell or node faster than the routing system could accommodate?

toomanybeersies 7y ago

I'm sure someone more qualified and experienced with phone networks can chip in, but from memory this is by design on the phone network, when it gets overloaded it just starts to connect randomly to reduce load. I can't remember exact details, because it's not my area of expertise, but I vaguely remember my father (who's a telecommunications network engineer) talking about it years ago.

simonh 7y ago
That doesn’t seem to make sense on the face of it. Connecting to the wrong number doesn’t reduce load, because the network still has to carry the call. Why not just fail to connect? I know you’re not a network engineer, but it just doesn’t look right.
- malandrew 7y ago
  Well it could reduce load if making a call is a much more expensive than a connected call. If the call, fails, I’ll try calling back and so will others. If I’m connected, I first need to establish comms with the person on the other end and determine it’s a misconmection before I can hang up and try again.
  - simonh 7y ago
    That's not the case though, the networks are all bandwidth constrained and connecting a call consumes negligible bandwidth. I'm not a radio or network engineer, but I used to work with them supporting cellular network panning software so I'm familiar with some aspects of the technology.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Yes that does odd - I do know the UK the mobile network is designed so that in case of major emergencies you can shutdown access for subs (normal users) and keep it up for emergency services etc.

staticautomatic 7y ago

I got misconnected once while trying to book a hotel reservation over the phone. Rooms became available 330 days out but a whole month at once, so when the reservation office opened at 8am or whatever on the first of the month, everyone would try to call in. So many people were calling this number that the system would start hanging up on people at random, so you'd just call back over and over hoping that you'd get connected when the phones went live. Finally, someone on the other end said "Hello?" and I said "Hi, I'd like to book a room for next summer" and he said "Me too" and I said "good luck!" and hung up.

whamlastxmas 7y ago
What hotel is this that people go to such lengths to book?
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  This is pretty common for big events, especially in smaller metros that don't have a huge amount of hotel capacity: Conventions, college football games, college graduations, etc.
- staticautomatic 7y ago
  The Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park.

Steve44 7y ago

About 20 years ago I was following a friend in a car and we ended up a few cars apart. I called his mobile and just said “which way are we going at the roundabout”. The person on the other end was very confused, it wasn’t my friend but the car directly in front of me. I’ve no idea how that happened but was incredibly bizarre and I think the other driver was more freaked out than I was.