AT&T Network Weirdness: iPhone Only Network Problem?

Yesterday, I asked…

Why Can’t AT&T Wireless Figure Out How to Run a Network? Hawaii Down All Day & Night – So Far

My voice and data access remained down until yesterday morning. The best guess is that I was out of service over 30 hours. The story didn’t end there, however. Later in the afternoon I ran into something very odd while checking my email. Access to the mail server timed out. This isn’t unusual since I’ve had issues with the IMAP4 servers I access in the past. So, I popped open the iPhone’s Safari browser to check if I could see a web page. I assumed this would be the case since I saw a good voice signal strength and the 3G data indicator on my screen. However, a few seconds later, signal quality dropped for both voice and data and I was presented with this message (see screenshot above)…

Could not activate cellular data network

So, despite AT&T’s claims that service was restored hours earlier, there was still something a bit whacky about their network at that time. The strange thing is that the problem seemed to mostly (if not exclusively) affect iPhones. It would be nice if AT&T came clean on this outage.

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