No matter how prepared you are, when harsh weather hits the effects are usually quite damaging. Hurricane Sandy not only put homes and buildings to the test, but took a big hit on cellphone and cable services. Most likely you will be struggling to make and receive calls and text messages for a while. According to Jordan Crook of TechCrunch:

“According to the FCC, 25 percent of cell towers in ten states were disrupted or damaged during the Hurricane. Landline outages are “far fewer” but 25 percent of cable services have also gone down, meaning many are without news updates at all.

As far as 911 is concerned, there are only a very small number of call centers that were affected by the storm. But while cell coverage is still shoddy, 911 calls are being rerouted to different call centers for the time being.

…We’ve seen throughout the past couple days that some of the carriers are having issues, namely Verizon, which still has a couple feet of water in its Manhattan headquarters. Still, these service providers are asking that customers use social networks like Twitter to take the load off of cell networks.”

Outages from hurricanes and other types of storms are hard to plan and test for. But hopefully with each real world incident, cellular and cable networks will be more prepared for the next.

Has your cellphone been experiencing any issues? Let us know in the comments section.