10 Infamous Movie Plot Holes That Have Simple Explanations
8. How Can Kevin Order A Pizza If The Phone Lines Are Down? - Home Alone
The "Plot Hole"
If Kevin's (Macaulay Culkin) parents are unable to call him due to a tree falling on nearby phone lines during a storm, how is Kevin still able to call up Little Nero's for a pizza delivery later in the movie?
The Explanation
It's a fair enough question, albeit one answerable with some technical knowledge about how phone calls actually work. A Redditor with the necessary know-how suggested the accident only affected long-distance calls:
"I always assumed the tree actually severed the main trunk line to the whole town, but local calls within the same exchange still worked."
And if you didn't want to take a mere Reddit user's word for it, The Huffington Post reached out to AT&T Vice President-Federal Regulatory Hank Hultquist, who confirmed as much:
"Everything is changing now because all of this phone capability is moving into the cloud, but in 1990, that was absolutely a plausible scenario. 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."