Earlier today, AT&T suffered a major outage of its cellular network in the US. Users began reporting issues connecting with AT&T’s network as early as 4 am Eastern time today. The event lasted for a number of hours before AT&T announced around 3 pm Eastern time today that it had restored the service for all of its customers.
Earlier this evening, AT&T posted another update with a very general, and also very vague, explanation of today’s events:
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, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.
AT&T has not offered any more details on what happened to its wireless network. Many people speculated online that the cause of today’s outage was indeed some kind of sophisticated hacker attack, but the company’s statement tonight seems to push that theory aside.
However, that is not stopping the US government from looking into today’s incident. Reuters reports that White House national security spokesperson John Kirby stated that both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were looking into AT&T’s cellular outage. Kirby echoed AT&T’s comment that this does not appear to be a cyber-attack.
We are aware of the reported wireless outages, and our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is actively investigating. We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers.
— The FCC (@FCC) February 22, 2024
In addition, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) posted on its X (formerly Twitter) account that its own Public Safety division was investigating the disruption. Hopefully, we will get a much more detailed explanation from AT&T about what happened and perhaps how the company will keep it from happening again.