inReach, AT&T, "Minor outage."

[Shadyapex]

Just a heads up. I tested my inReach Monday before heading out for a quick 2 night trip to Death Valley, high country given the time of year, and my text message from Earthmate to my AT&T cell phone didn't come through. I went to explore.garmin.com to see if I could figure it out and there was a notice that inReach texts that include the location data link weren't going through to AT&T phones. The notice is gone now but texts still aren't going through.
Have any of you experienced this? Hope they find a fix soon.

 

[Old Crow]

I can't answer on the AT&T issue but I did want to provide some info for anyone interested in Inreach status info.

Garmin has several ways to check the status of the Inreach system as described at this Garmin Support Center page.

Out of curiosity, I subscribed to the text and email notifications several years ago. I've been getting notifications about three times a month. That's typically a text and email telling me one of the services is down or delayed and then a follow-up saying it's back up.

At the status.inreach.garmin.com page you can see a visual representation of status for the last couple of months. If you put your cursor on the line, you can see more detail, including the length of the outage. And if you scroll down, you can see a three-month history in a different format.

The text or email message tells you what function isn't working and typically will also say whether email and SOS are affected by the outage or delay.
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[ski3pin]

Not specifically an AT&T cell phone issue, but we had a long term problem with one of our contacts receiving our text messages. Her carrier was verizon. She suddenly stopped receiving our messages. I worked with Garmin support who worked hard to resolve the issue but could not. It went back and forth - Verizon said Garmin issue. Garmin said Verizon issue. There it sat until after months and the messages started to go through again. No explanation.

Barking Spider had a issue with his daughter not receiving his InReach texts on her AT&T phone. He ended up in back and forth land. He noticed that Garmin was using a bank of phone numbers (213 area code) to send the cell phone text messages. He asked Garmin to change the forwarding number and the messages came through.

Hope some of this offers suggestions of a route to success.

 

[Shadyapex]

Thanks all, I checked the status page again today and we're back in the green. So I did a test text and it went through. Still, not super confidence inspiring for an emergency device.

 

[Kolockum]

I wonder if the provider's anti-robo call/text software is blocking some of their texts. Regardless I would bet there are no problems with the actual emergency button.

 

[ski3pin]

and I have not seen a problem with emails. My main recipients, who I want to be sure receive our messages, I back up a phone number with an email.

 

[Shadyapex]

I wonder if the provider's anti-robo call/text software is blocking some of their texts. Regardless I would bet there are no problems with the actual emergency button.

I suspect/hope you're right. It was a temporary "outage" and as annoying as it was it wasn't consequential in any way. I suspect we'll never know the cause as garmin will likely blame it on AT&T and vise versa. I'm just glad they got it sorted out.

 

[Shadyapex]

and I have not seen a problem with emails. My main recipients, who I want to be sure receive our messages, I back up a phone number with an email.

I should start doing that. I gave up emailing for a bit as my dad was the main recipient and he couldn't remember to click the link to respond. Sadly this is no longer an issue.

 

[Old Crow]

Info:

I just received a text and email telling me the the AT&T problem (Inreach SMS messages to AT&T phones) is happening again.

This is what it looks like in email:

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Some inReach SMS messages are not being delivered to AT&T customers


New incident: Investigating


We are investigating an issue with some inReach SMS messages not being delivered to AT&T customers. We recommend using email to reach contacts using AT&T.



Time posted


Sep 20, 13:44 EDT



Components affected

SMS/Text Communication


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As I type this, the status bar for SMS messages at status.inreach.garmin.com has just changed the last vertical bar from green to gray and shows a time of 5 minutes.

You may also have noticed that they're recommending use of email to reach AT&T contacts. That reminds us that email and SMS messages are different functions. One can be operating when the other isn't. That reinforces ski3pin's idea of putting in both SMS (phone number) and email address in for important messages.
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