AT&T restores service after hours of outage
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[February 23, 2024]
By Aditya Soni and David Shepardson
(Reuters) -AT&T said late on Thursday an outage that disrupted calls and
text messages for thousands of U.S. users and prompted federal
investigations was not caused by a cyberattack.
The carrier had restored wireless service for all affected customers,
several hours after an outage that affected more than 70,000 users at
its peak.
"Based on our initial review, we believe that today's outage was caused
by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were
expanding our network," the wireless carrier said in a statement on its
website.
AT&T, whose 5G network covers around 290 million people across the
United States, has been grappling with interruptions to its service for
more than 10 hours.
"We are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this
again in the future," AT&T earlier said on its website.
The Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the
incident, while the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (CISA) said it was working with AT&T to understand the cause.
White House spokesman John Kirby said the FBI and the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) were looking into the AT&T outage. CISA is a
unit of DHS.
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"We are being told AT&T has no reason to think this was a cyber or
security incident," said Kirby, adding that the FCC was in touch with
the company.
"But the bottom line is we don't have all the answers," he said about
the cause of the outage.
AT&T declined to comment on the FCC's investigation into the incident.
The company did not provide further details on the reason for the outage
and the number of affected users.
AT&T shares were down 2.4% in afternoon trading. The number of outage
incidents to about 3,255 by around 2:47 p.m. ET (1947 GMT), according to
tracking website Downdetector.com.
The FBI also said that it was in touch with the company about the
network outage. "Should we learn of any malicious activity, we will
respond accordingly," it said in a statement.
Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis firm Kentik, said it was
unclear from the outside what exactly had happened at AT&T, although he
said he doubted it was the result of malicious activity.
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The company logo for AT&T is displayed on a screen on the floor at
the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., September 18,
2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
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"I'm skeptical this was some kind of an attack," he said in a
telephone interview. "Most of these things end up being some kind of
a software push that got screwed up somehow."
The outage affected people's ability to reach emergency services by
dialing 911, according to posts on the X social media platform by
government departments in several U.S. cities.
"We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from
making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911), the San
Francisco Fire Department said on X.
The Prince William County Police Department in Virginia and
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina posted
similar statements on the platform.
Users of Verizon, T-Mobile and UScellular also faced disruptions,
but they were more limited than the AT&T reports, Downdetector
showed.
The other companies said their network was operating normally and
the outage was potentially related to customers trying to connect
with other networks.
U.S. Senator Rick Scott of Florida said in a post on X that he had
contacted AT&T for an update.
"Florida law enforcement is doing everything it can to keep people
safe, and I expect AT&T to keep us informed on what it is doing to
get 911 services fully back online ASAP," he said.
In 2021, regulators settled for $19.5 million a probe into a
T-Mobile outage during the pandemic that lasted over 12 hours and
led to more than 20,000 failed 911 emergency calls.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni and Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru,
David Shepardson, Raphael Satter and Kanishka Singh in Washington;
Additional reporting by Nilutpal Timsina, Kanjyik Ghosh, Arsheeya
Bajwa and Priyanka G; Editing by Alexander Smith and Stephen Coates)
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