An Amazon Web Services outage midday Tuesday took out a swath of gaming logins, streaming video services and cloud-based events, including the Vizio investor presentation at a virtual UBS technology conference. Amazon reported “impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The outage affected some of Amazon’s monitoring and incident response tooling, “which is delaying our ability to provide updates,” said Amazon, saying it “identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.” The Verge reported outages for Disney+ streaming and games and some problems accessing Amazon.com, the Alexa voice assistant, Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music and Ring security cameras. “There are reports from network admins everywhere about errors connecting to Amazon’s instances and the AWS Management Console that controls their access to the servers,” said the Verge. The webpage for Vizio’s event said the presentation was being recorded and the replay “will be posted as soon as the AWS Network is back up.”
ISP associations asked the 2nd U.S. Circuit of Appeals to require their brief by Feb. 23 on New York’s appeal of a lower court rejecting the state’s broadband affordability law, in letters Monday in case 21-1975 from the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association, New York State Telecommunications Association, CTIA, USTelecom and NTCA. U.S. District Court in Central Islip, New York, temporarily blocked the state law earlier this year, ruling ISPs would likely succeed on conflict and field preemption arguments (see 2107230044). Last week, in an amicus brief, California, Illinois, 20 other states and the District of Columbia said they “seek to defend New York’s sovereign right to exercise its police powers against Plaintiffs’ unwarranted assertions of federal preemption.” Amici “regularly exercise their sovereign authority to enact and enforce numerous laws applicable to broadband providers and other online businesses,” including laws “aimed at securing their residents’ access to vital goods and services,” they said. “There is nothing about the Internet that necessitates a departure from that normal state of affairs, and certainly nothing that warrants it in the absence of clear direction from Congress.” In other amici filings, the Benton Institute and Public Knowledge said the New York law is “a targeted and state-specific regulatory response to the problem of the digital divide.” Access Now, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and others said federal “programs, while being helpful and effective, have not fully solved" the "broadband affordability problem.” The Greenlining Institute said states “have long played an essential role in regulating both interstate and intrastate communications, both as an exercise of their inherent sovereign police powers and within a federal statutory framework that leaves room to adapt communications law and policies to local concerns.” The district court's field preemption claim, if affirmed, "would invalidate vital state laws regulating areas of traditional local concern -- including consumer protection, public health, and public safety,” wrote seven internet law professors including Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig and Stanford Law School’s Barbara van Schewick. It would “leave both the FCC and the states without regulatory authority, leaving Americans wholly unprotected from harms by interstate communications providers,” they said.
China Telecom Americas didn't satisfy "the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said in an order Thursday (docket 21-1233) denying the company's emergency motion for a stay of the FCC’s October order revoking the company’s domestic and international authorities (see 2111080056). The decision was made by Judges Cornelia Pillard, Justin Walker and Judith Rogers. China Telecom outside counsel didn't comment. The company is also appealing the revocation (see 2111150025).
Facebook took down coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB), brigading and mass reporting operations from China, Palestine, Poland, Belarus, Vietnam, Italy and France, Meta said Wednesday in an end-of-year threat report. The report came as Facebook was the primary focus of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on possible legislation to tighten oversight of social media companies(see 2112010058). Meta said it removed a network of accounts in Vietnam that were falsely reporting activists and other critics of the Vietnamese government in an attempt to have them removed from the platform. It said it removed a network of accounts from Italy and France that targeted medical professionals, politicians and journalists with mass harassment involving vaccinations and said it removed an array of Facebook accounts, groups, pages and Instagram accounts for CIB tied to organizations including Hamas, the Belarusian KGB and Chinese information security firm Sichuan Silence Information Technology. Meta said it's expanding its CIB archive to more researchers worldwide over the next several months.
The FCC will shutter its Fee Filer in-house electronic payment system Dec. 15, replacing it with a payment module in the commission's registration system (Cores) for paying regulatory and other fees, said a public notice Wednesday. The agency said it also will discontinue its red light display system for viewing financial standing, open bills and installment bills on the same date. Those functions are already available via Cores, it said.
The FCC's Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council VIII will hold its second meeting Dec. 15, said Friday's Federal Register. The virtual meeting will begin 1 p.m. EST.
“Organic supply” at Analog Devices was affected from some of the COVID-19 factory shutdowns in Southeast Asia “that affected much of the industry,” said CEO Vincent Roche on a call Tuesday with analysts for fiscal Q4 ended Oct. 30. Revenue in the quarter still grew 33% sequentially from fiscal Q3 ended July 31, he said. “But as we've been talking about it for the last couple of quarters, our supply has been limited and revenue really is a function of supply. So that hiccup did put a little bit of pressure on the revenue line, and you'll see that correct itself as we go forward.” The company’s fiscal 2021 “truly demonstrated the vital importance of semiconductors to the modern digital age,” said Roche. “As we enter 2022, our backlog and bookings remain robust and we continue to invest in manufacturing capacity.” The chipmaker took “decisive action to add capacity throughout the year with more than $340 million in capital expenditures,” said the CEO. “This is enabling us to better navigate the near-term supply/demand imbalance while achieving our long-term growth objectives.” In the company’s communications sector, fiscal 2021 “was an uneven year, as strength in wired was offset by weakness in the China wireless market,” said Roche. “Encouragingly, as we look to 2022, the proliferation of 5G is gaining momentum globally, especially in North America.” The company this past year introduced the industry's first software-defined radio transceiver “that includes a fully integrated digital front end,” he said. “This next generation transceiver platform enables us to defend and extend our position in traditional 5G” and emerging open radio access networks, he said.
T-Mobile will pay $19.5 million to settle an FCC investigation into the carrier’s June 2020 emergency 911 outage (see 2006180047), said an Enforcement Bureau order Tuesday. The consent decree requires T-Mobile to implement a compliance plan including enhanced 911 outage notices to public safety answering points that will include more information, with follow-up notices required within two hours of initial notification. The disruption, caused at first by failure of a leased fiber transport link, lasted more than 12 hours and caused complete failure of more than 23,000 911 calls, plus about 23,000 calls without location information and about 20,000 calls to PSAPs without callback information, said the bureau. “The outage revealed, and was compounded by, a temporary routing flaw in a single location and two previously undetected flaws in third-party software. Restoration was also impacted by a temporary failure of remote access to the affected transport link.” T-Mobile gets “how critical reliable connectivity is to ensure public safety and we take that responsibility very seriously," a spokesperson emailed. "Following this outage, we immediately took additional steps to further enhance our network to prevent this type of event from happening in the future. Now, with this consent decree, we are moving on from the FCC’s investigation and continuing our focus on our ongoing network build.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said he's "outraged" regarding an Office of Inspector General report that some emergency broadband benefit providers were falsely claiming a child in a household attended a qualifying low-income school (see 2111220058). Carr said Tuesday he's "concerned" because he was "kept in the dark" about the report until it was made public, "even though others at the commission were read in ahead of time." The FCC "must put tighter controls in place" as the agency sets up the $14.2 billion affordable connectivity program, he said. The agency didn't comment.
Some emergency broadband benefit program providers' sales agents enroll households by "falsely claiming" the household includes a child attending a Department of Agriculture community eligibility provision (CEP) school during the eligibility verification process, said an FCC Office of Inspector General advisory Monday. The data "clearly show a number of CEP schools are grossly overrepresented in EBB household enrollments when compared to the actual student enrollment at those schools," the advisory said. OIG found nearly 50 provider retail stores listed as the home address for households and more than 2,000 households living more than 50 miles from their designated CEP school. OIG didn't identify the schools "to preserve the integrity of ongoing investigations." The Office of Managing Director directed Universal Service Administrative Co. to modify the EBB application portal to require proof of enrollment at a CEP school. The bureau is also referring bad actors to the Enforcement Bureau and recouping "improperly disbursed funds," said a public notice. Accepted documentation includes a school letter confirming enrollment or a report card, said a Wireline Bureau PN. The bureau is also requiring current EBB enrollees to confirm their CEP-based eligibility: Households that "fail to timely confirm their eligibility will be de-enrolled."