AT&T FAIL!

Like many of my colleagues, I use a wireless aircard for my daily internet access when I am away from my home office. For the past couple of months, I've noticed some significant issues when trying go about my daily research and whatnot. One example is that I have found that I can't get to Google.

Seriously, no Google! How on earth am I supposed to function when I can't go google something? This also means that I can't get to my mail (which I host with Google) and just about anything else that is attached to Google (blogger.com, youtube, etc.). As you can imagine, this is *really* annoying.

Today I was so frustrated that I decided to do the unthinkable - I called AT&T Technical Support to see if they were experiencing an outage. Since my wireless account is paid for through my employer, I call the Business class tech support number, give them the corporate account number and password and begin to explain the issues. I make special effort to underscore the fact that several of my co-workers are experiencing the _EXACT SAME_ behaviour. After I give my 3 - 5 minute disertation on what steps I have taken to troubleshoot the issue (pings, traceroutes, etc.) the "technical support engineer" assisting me starts asking about which version of the software I am using. I decide to humor him and give him some details... After I, once again, explain that others are seeing the same issue and how I *really* don't think that changing anything on my computer will fix the network issues they are having, he tries to convince me to uninstall the device from my computer and update my device driver. Somewhere along the way here I become convinced that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about and I let it slip that his ideas are retarded. That's when he hangs up on me. (I can't say I blame him).

Anyway... My friend/co-worker and I start digging around online and find the following:

AT&T DNS Servers Broken

-and-

AT&T DNS Server Hacked in Texas

So why didn't the dude on the phone just tell me (or know for that matter) that there was some ongoing DNS issue? I specifically asked him if they were experiencing an outage and he told me that everything was "fine".

I've ended up just using OpenDNS for my resolvers now. Guess I'll stick with that for a while.