3 ms·

What's crazy is that RCS messaging is down as a result of this outage. It shows how poorly the technology or infrastructure was designed.

dcchambers 1y ago
Oh my god is that why my RCS chats were failing earlier?!?!
wbl 1y ago
That explains why I couldn't get the photo of my parents dog today.
foota 1y ago
Isn't RCS basically just instant messaging? I don't know why it's surprising that it would be down.
- roywiggins 1y ago
  I'm not sure any single company could have an outage that would take out SMS globally, but RCS is presumably more centralized.
  - watusername 1y ago
    It used to be kind of distributed, but Google has been strong arming carriers to use their hosted Jibe service through a combination of proprietary extensions (e.g., E2E which is finally standard) and bypassing carrier control (if the carrier didn't provision RCS, Google Messages would use their own service iMessage-style). From the end user's perspective, if the carrier didn't use Jibe RCS, it simply wouldn't work well.
  - whynotminot 1y ago
    People liked to be utterly pissed at Apple for not supporting RCS. But there were reasons
  - toast0 1y ago
    SMS is pretty much decentralized, although there's a few companies with a lot of reach. I don't remember any Global SMS outages, but it wasn't uncommon for a whole carrier to have an SMS outage and especially for inter-carrier SMS to be broken from time to time (sometimes for days). I've certainly seen some stuff with SMS aggregators: almost all of them claim a majority of direct links, but when you have accounts with 4 large aggregators and one of them has an outage, you find out which of your other account use that aggregator for which links (because their deliverability will go to zero to those destinations). RCS was designed and specced, by GSMA, as a telco run decentralized system that would replace SMS as like for like; but there were only a handful of rollouts. It's really only gotten use as Google pushed it onto Android, using their RCS server; recently iOS started using it although I don't know what server they attach to. Since RCS is basically the 5th wave Google IM, it's no surprise when they have a major outage, RCS is pretty much broken.
    - lieuwex 1y ago
      > recently iOS started using it although I don't know what server they attach to. According to Wikipedia, only the carrier's RCS server is used [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Software_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#So...
      - ethanblake4 1y ago
        All of the major carriers use Google Jibe as their RCS backend anyway though, so it's pretty irrelevant.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 1y ago
should have used Erlang

dcchambers 1y ago

Oh my god is that why my RCS chats were failing earlier?!?!

wbl 1y ago

That explains why I couldn't get the photo of my parents dog today.

foota 1y ago

Isn't RCS basically just instant messaging? I don't know why it's surprising that it would be down.

roywiggins 1y ago
I'm not sure any single company could have an outage that would take out SMS globally, but RCS is presumably more centralized.
- watusername 1y ago
  It used to be kind of distributed, but Google has been strong arming carriers to use their hosted Jibe service through a combination of proprietary extensions (e.g., E2E which is finally standard) and bypassing carrier control (if the carrier didn't provision RCS, Google Messages would use their own service iMessage-style). From the end user's perspective, if the carrier didn't use Jibe RCS, it simply wouldn't work well.
- whynotminot 1y ago
  People liked to be utterly pissed at Apple for not supporting RCS. But there were reasons
- toast0 1y ago
  SMS is pretty much decentralized, although there's a few companies with a lot of reach. I don't remember any Global SMS outages, but it wasn't uncommon for a whole carrier to have an SMS outage and especially for inter-carrier SMS to be broken from time to time (sometimes for days). I've certainly seen some stuff with SMS aggregators: almost all of them claim a majority of direct links, but when you have accounts with 4 large aggregators and one of them has an outage, you find out which of your other account use that aggregator for which links (because their deliverability will go to zero to those destinations). RCS was designed and specced, by GSMA, as a telco run decentralized system that would replace SMS as like for like; but there were only a handful of rollouts. It's really only gotten use as Google pushed it onto Android, using their RCS server; recently iOS started using it although I don't know what server they attach to. Since RCS is basically the 5th wave Google IM, it's no surprise when they have a major outage, RCS is pretty much broken.
  - lieuwex 1y ago
    > recently iOS started using it although I don't know what server they attach to. According to Wikipedia, only the carrier's RCS server is used [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Software_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#So...
    - ethanblake4 1y ago
      All of the major carriers use Google Jibe as their RCS backend anyway though, so it's pretty irrelevant.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 1y ago

should have used Erlang