Obama’s ‘Leave the World Behind’ trends amid cellular outage
Is there another force at play?
A massive cellphone outage affecting users across the US quickly piqued interest on Thursday — and so did the Netflix thriller “Leave the World Behind.”
Subscribers to the Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile networks have experienced a drop in service and the reason has yet to be determined. Many AT&T customers reported that they were stuck in “SOS mode,” when you can contact only emergency services, and some police departments have been unable to receive 911 calls.
Amid the chaos, the first feature film from High Ground, the production company founded by former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in 2018, has gone viral.
Why?
In the disaster flick, starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke, mobile devices, TVs and other technological communication go down after a cyber attack.
The film is based on a 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam and directed, written and produced by “filmmaker “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail.
Social media users — those who still have service — are finding parallels between the movie and the outages, which have affected New York, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco.
Some viewers joked that the former president, 62, is involved in personally bringing down the phone lines.
“‘Leave The World Behind’… it’s like he had a crystal ball,” one wrote alongside a GIF of Obama clapping.
“Woke up this AM & noticed my iPhone was on 🆘. After turning my phone on/off a million times I come to find out @ATT has a major outage. The Obama’s tried to warn us,” someone wrote.
Another commenter added: “The predictive programming of the Obama’s movie, ‘Leave The World Behind’ is becoming a little too real right now. I wouldn’t put it past our own federal government to institute a terrorist or cyber attack.”
A viewer chimed in: “Leave the world behind is trending (the Obama movie). We have no cell phone coverage right now. No carrier is working. My building’s front door won’t open remotely without cell phone.”
Others quipped that Netflix orchestrated the blackout and that its marketing for “Leave the World Behind” was genius.
“Well played #Netflix .. if you wanted us to watch #leavetheworldbehind then all you had to do was say that… This whole taking down #att network is a bit much.. but the marketing strategy is working,” a user scribed.
“Literally just watched ‘Leave the World Behind’ last night and woke up to all 3 cellphone networks being down,” a nervous viewer wrote.
The cause of the outrages still remains unclear, but by 11:30 a.m., AT&T announced that three-quarters of its network had already been restored.
“We are continuing to monitor the situation,” a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement, noting that subscribers “experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier.”
A spokesperson from T-Mobile similarly alleged that “Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
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