SOS Radio
Canadian anon here, our SOS/emergency/weather radio station is presently interrupted/down. Today December 19th between 4:30pm PT and now 8:00pm PT. Still down as I write this. This is very unusual. Since 4:30pm it broadcasts this loop message:
We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with our broadcast. We hope to have the system return to normal operation as soon as possible. We are sorry for the interruption.
This radio station is facing the largest Canadian military base & military airport on the west coast:
A first interesting "coincidence" is that at the exact same time the SOS radio went down, right after 4:30pm the sunset time, so right after it was dark, a unusual larger than usual amount of flights were sighted between the military base airport and civilian airport. Including both helicopters and planes. Lower than usual altitude. Much lower than usual. Windows are shaking. On their website there is no flights departure scheduled at this time.
Maybe they just have good faith "technical difficulties". Or maybe they need a temporary controlled & lawful black out on all communications to facilitate their operations.
What Is A SOS Radio?
Many people are scratching their heads here. For those not familiar with SOS Radio, it is also call a Weather radio. It is use in case of major catastrophe events, severe weather events, or when the infrastructure goes down, make emergency announcement. Rescue team, army, firefighter, medics, boats, often use it to communicate information to the public. Those SOS radios have multiple backups for redundancy. It is a first that a SOS radio is "interrupted".
Internet
A second interesting "coincidence", is the cable internet was down between December 19th, 4:30pm PT and 7:55pm PT. This is unusual. At 7:55pm is back to normal.
Guess where that cable internet goes through? Yes, the same military base. There have a data center there.
I'm posting this with one of my backup internet connections
Ping
A third interesting "coincidence", is that ALL internet ping fails. Including HTTP, HTTPS, IP, Domain Names, Tor Browser, etc. When pinging any, this suspicious and never seen before message is display:
Temporary failure in name resolution
Question
Anybody else has unusual outages? Radio, internet, mobile, electricity?
Update
My SOS radio is back now. Sunday December 20th, 2020 at 5:30pm PT. So it was down for 24 hours.
Their loop message stop. Now there are back to their normal broadcasting. Just normal stuff. No emergency. No unusual messages. So my guess is that it was just a coincidence of multiple unusual events all at the same time.
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[–] 26877698? 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
It sounds like the major ISP had a DNS resolution problem. It happens sometimes. The NOAA weather radio may use the internet to deliver the audio to the radio transmitter, originating in a studio somewhere else. If they have no backup means to deliver it, or if the main mode and the backup mode are both using the same internet, this would cause the radio station to go dark.
An example of this would be a cut fiber optic trunk in between major cities that otherwise are pretty isolated and have no other means to get to the internet. These often take hours to days to repair, depending on the complexity of the break. In my city, a backhoe operator accidentally cut a fiber trunk that my work uses, and it took us offline for 48 hours. That line has been in continuous operation without failure for over 10 years. Fortunately, I had put in a backup system that uses a completely different path, and we were able to cut over to the backup without any issue, or my company would have been down for 48 hours.
I have no explanation for the military aircraft, but the internet and NOAA weather radio problems you are describing are pretty mundane. I work in the biz.