AT&T Unveils Reason Behind Huge Thursday Outage

On Thursday, February 22, at approximately 4 a.m. ET, over 32,000 outages were recorded throughout AT&T’s network. By 7 a.m., that figure had risen to more than fifty thousand. About 75,000 outages were reported just before 9:15 a.m. ET, according to the Down Detector website.

Let’s read the news and find out more.

AT&T Unveils Reason Behind Huge Thursday Outage

AT&T has been dealing with service outages across its 5G network, which serves around 290 million people in the United States, for more than ten hours.

The areas most affected by the AT&T outage were Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. In addition, there were also complaints of outages from several locations in Florida, Michigan, and New York.

After hundreds of thousands of US subscribers’ wireless services were interrupted by a software bug, the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into the outage.

Late on Thursday, AT&T announced that a phone and text message disruption that affected thousands of US subscribers in their network was not due to a cyberattack.

Rather, AT&T said in a statement released on its website on Thursday night that the internet and cellular outages resulted from maintenance it was performing on its infrastructure.

Also, read “US First Private Spacecraft Moon Landing in 50 Years“

The last updated statement from the business stated, “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.”

On their website, At 11:15 a.m. ET, AT&T announced that it had restored “three-quarters” of its network, marking the beginning of the business’s eventual recovery from the issue.

The website stated, “Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers.”

The business then declared that it had restored wireless service to all the impacted customers around 3:10 p.m. ET.

Also, read “Google Launches Gemini AI for Workspace Tools at $20“

The website stated, “We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”

Regarding the network outage, the FBI claimed it was “in contact with AT&T” and assured that if they “learn of any malicious activity, we will respond accordingly.”

Government agencies from various American cities posted on social media platform X about how the outage impacted people’s ability to contact emergency services by dialing 911.

The hours of outage had greatly impacted people and caused them trouble reaching out to anyone, including emergency services.

The San Francisco Fire Department stated on X, “We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911).”

Also, read “Elon Musk: First Neuralink User Controls Mouse with Thoughts“

To conclude, it is comforting to hear that there hasn’t been any malicious activity causing the outage. However, customers are still eager to learn more about the issue and what steps AT&T takes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.