AT&T Inc acknowledged that a significant outage that took several hours to fix on Thursday (February 22) was due to an “erroneous procedure” implemented during the expansion of their wireless network. The software glitch disrupted wireless services for hundreds of thousands of users in the US and led to an investigation by the
FBI
and the US Department of
Homeland Security
into the outage.
FBI and DHS to investigate the outage
The Federal Communications Commission also has been in touch with AT&T to try and ascertain the cause, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “DHS and the FBI are looking into this as well, working with the tech industry, these network providers, to see what we can do from a federal perspective to enhance their investigative efforts to figure out what happened here,” Kirby said.
What AT&T said on the downtime
According to a report in Bloomberg, an AT&T spokesperson stated, “Our initial analysis suggests that the outage today was the result of the application and execution of a flawed process as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing to evaluate today’s outage to ensure we maintain the level of service our customers expect.”
Over one million reports filed on Downdetector
AT&T confirmed that all wireless services were restored by Thursday afternoon, ending a day of inconvenience that started in the early morning hours, New York time. More than 1.5 million outage reports were filed by AT&T customers on the service-tracking website Downdetector.
The federal government reportedly initiated an investigation to determine if the network failure was the result of a cyberattack, as per two US officials who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the information.
The Federal Communications Commission has also been in contact with AT&T to determine the cause, according to White House spokesperson John Kirby. He added, “The DHS and the FBI are also investigating this, collaborating with the tech industry and network providers to see what can be done from a federal standpoint to support their investigative efforts to determine what occurred here.”
Early on Thursday, mobile phone users from various carriers began reporting issues, but it quickly became apparent that AT&T’s network was the primary source of the problem. Outages were reported in cities including New York, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, and Dallas. The disruption in service affected communication with emergency responders, prompting officials to advise AT&T customers to use landlines for 911 emergency calls.
With approximately 87 million subscribers, AT&T is the third-largest retail wireless carrier in the US, trailing Verizon Communications Inc and T-Mobile US Inc, as per data compiled by Bloomberg. Both Verizon and T-Mobile confirmed that their services were functioning normally.
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