Verizon and IT

I wasn't aware that this was widespread enough to be newsworthy... In case you didn't hear, on Wednesday,  December 8th, Verizon's 3G network "went down". If you hadn't heard, here's the Engadget story on it, a couple hours after it started. The funny thing about it is, it wasn't actually "down". As many of you most likely noticed, your phones still said they were connected to 3G which led many to freak out and think their phones were dying. You see, here at IT Freedom, we've talked about openness pretty much exclusively (including the Wikileaks story), but we haven't talked about IT in any kind of meaningful way. But here, with this Verizon story, we can!
At the time it happened (12:30 - 1:00 A.M. Central), I was stuck at work with nothing to do. I got on my phone (Palm Pre Plus) intent on surfing the web and reading some tech stories. The first place I go is Engadget and lo and behold, I get a big, steaming pile of nothing! Confused, I head to TechCrunch, much to the same effect. It looked like my network was down, but the phone still said it was connected. I then open up Preware (I love Palm/HP for letting the homebrewers do their thing, btw) and it can't update it's feeds or connect to anything. I reboot my phone, to no effect. I fully shut it down and take out the battery. When I turn it on, still the same. I open up a terminal and run ifconfig real quick (bash command, like ipconfig in Windows) and found I was pulling a valid IP and connected. I then try Google in my browser, nothing. I ran a ping on google.com and it gave me an error "bad host". Anyone getting a picture yet? Well, I was. So I tried a different route. I do happen to know the IP of one server off the top of my head (I'm working on it at the local University). I pinged that and... Success! I navigated to it in my browser and I could view it perfectly! Checked Google again and still nothing. Anybody figure out what it was yet? Verizon's connection wasn't down, just their dns service.
Why haven't we heard about the Verizon dns issues? We have, but none of the so-called "tech blogs" went far enough to find out what was wrong. They were perfectly content to just sit there and let Verizon "fix their network issues". Sure, many of these tech writers are knowledgeable, and I'm sure a good portion of them are perfectly intelligent people, but they didn't know Verizon's problem was a dns issue. So, why didn't they know? This boils down to what it means to be a good IT person. It takes one part knowledge, and two parts what I like to call "hacker spirit". Knowledge and intelligence are very important in IT, but doesn't get you very far if you don't have the hacker spirit. You have to be willing to put in a little time and look at a problem from different angles. You need to be creative, but more importantly, you need to want to figure out what's going wrong. You have to want to tear down whatever you're looking at and see how it works, not wait for the information to be spoon-fed to you. Without this creativity and drive to see how stuff works, you're not really a "tech person" are you? Really, without that, you're just someone who likes playing with all the shiny toys. If you want to do well in the tech world, you need this hacker spirit. Sure, if your goal in life is to be a data-entry person or a code monkey (or apparently, a tech writer), you don't need it. If you're satisfied with that existence, more power to you. I'm sure you'll be a great tool to the people who have it.