Telecom Outages as Public‑Safety Failures

When large carriers suffer regional or national outages and emergency‑alert systems are triggered, the event is less a consumer inconvenience and more a public‑safety incident that should be treated like a utility failure. Policymakers need standardized incident reporting, mandated redundancy (multi‑carrier fallback, wireline alternatives), verified public postmortems, and clear rules for when authorities may switch to alternative communications to preserve 911 and official alerts. — Recognizing telecom outages as infrastructure failures reframes regulation and emergency planning, because wireless blackouts immediately impair life‑and‑death services and require cross‑sector resilience policies.