Home Alone’s major plot hole has been explained

A glaring problem with Home Alone's plot has been hanging over the movie for years (aside from the would-be robbers’ injuries likely leaving them dead many times over) - why is it that when Kevin’s family realise he is missing and try to phone home the line is dead, but Kevin is later able to order a cheese pizza using the same line?

It’s explained in the film that a tree falling on power lines during a storm causes the outage (and the family’s alarms to not go off in the morning), so how did Kevin manage to get through to Little Nero’s pizza?

A Reddit user presented an answer:

“I always assumed the tree actually severed the main trunk line to the whole town, but local calls within the same exchange still worked.”

It turns out they were right, with The Huffington Post contacting AT&T’s Vice President for Federal Regulatory Affairs for verification.

“Everything is changing now because all of this phone capability is moving into the cloud, but in 1990, that was absolutely a plausible scenario,” he said, adding that there could have been other factors contributing to why Kevin’s family couldn’t get hold of him.

“When you’re trying to call from Paris, now you’re relying on a whole series of connections including undersea cables, any one of which could have a problem, which would prevent you from reaching some particular telephone number.”

There, now we can all sleep in peace.