They framed it incorrectly but they’re still right, mistakes happen, and no matter what you plan for really bad things can happen.

This wasn’t a catastrophe it was some downtown (and it wasn’t even all their customers in all their service areas – my uncle had this problem his wife did not, they’re both on AT&T in literally the same house). It’s happened with Google, it’s happened with Amazon AWS, it’s happened with various other major players. Nobody and no department is immune to them, making AT&T a nationalized company is very unlikely to have helped here.

In fact, because we’re so bad at raising taxes to fund our federal agencies and things … it might actually be worse in terms of reliability.