The Dark Side of Robocalls

Robocall season is over. Political robocalls may be the one thing that's more annoying than leaf blowers. Robocalls are also implicated in efforts to thwart people from voting on election day. But until this election season, robocalls had never brought a phone network to its knees.

In parts of New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, a flood of robocalls the night before the election overwhelmed Comcast's telephone system, according to the Boston Globe. A Comcast spokesperson said, "Comcast is experiencing severe call volumes on the evening before the election due to auto dialing activity that is generating a massive number of inbound political phone calls to our network. As soon as we were made aware of the congestion this was causing, we began to reroute traffic around it." Other phone carriers may have had their phone systems disrupted, too.

Another good reason to put a stop to this unpleasant political intrusion.