Why the US still won’t require SS7 fixes that could secure your phone

Enlarge (credit: CJ Ostrosky/POGO) This article was reported in partnership with the Project On Government Oversight. It was written by POGO investigator Andrea Peterson, and it incorporates research from former POGO intern Vanessa Perry.


The outages hit in the summer of 1991. Over several days, phone lines in major metropolises went dead without warning, disrupting emergency services and even air traffic control, often for hours. Phones went down one day in Los Angeles, then on another day in Washington, DC and Baltimore, and then in Pittsburgh. Even after service was restored to an area, there was no guarantee the lines would not fail again—and sometimes they did. The outages left millions of Americans disconnected.
The culprit? A computer glitch. A coding mistake in software used to route calls for a piece of telecom infrastructure known as Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) caused network-crippling overloads. It was an early sign of the fragility of the digital architecture that binds together the nation’s phone systems.
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