Curious to learn whether any RMN readers and agents were affected by this outage.

This Is Beyond Bizarre - Phone Outages Concentrated Heavily In The Same Pockets Of America By All These Providers - Command, Control And Communication Test?
Susan Duclos | All News Pipeline
May 5, 2016
http://bit.ly/1UD6138

Late last night ANP received an interesting email informing us that Verizon was down in no less than 17 states and that a Verizon tech had told the reader it was pre-paid phones only, but what we found when we started to research these outages is beyond bizarre.

We found that it was not just Verizon, nor just pre-paid cell phones, but AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile also received significant amounts of reports, and in looking at the outage maps over at Down Detector, each service provider suffered outages which were heavily concentrated in the exact same pockets of America, from coast to coast.

...

The majority of complaints were of no phone service, and to a lesser extent no mobile Internet data, but we also see a significant percent at T-Mobile and AT&T where there was no service, no network or reception.

The first thing I did was check space weather, but found nothing of note that would be significant enough to cause outages this widespread along coastal areas, nor disrupt satellites that would cause this type of widepsread communications failure.

The second thing I did was contact a trusted ANP source who informed me his prepaid phone also went down, this could only be done at a central location, and it is his belief that this was a test to cause people not to be able to communicate, stating "This is the first thing taken out in any operation - Command, Control, Communication."

BOTTOM LINE

Had this happened only to Verizon this article wouldn't have been written because a variety of issues could cause a company, even as large as Verizon, to suffer outages even in multiple states, but when we see four of the largest communications providers like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon all having failures around the same time, heavily concentrated in the same locations, all along both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico where we just happened to have large amounts of ports...... we find it too much to chalk up to simple coincidences.

Beyond Bizarre - Phone Outages Coastal Locations
Susan Duclos
May 5, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPCxChP0Xt8