02/23/2024

AT&T Says Massive Cell Outage Caused by Technical Error

They denied that it was a cyberattack

The massive cellphone outage that affected greater than 1.7 million customers and disrupted 911 services in several states was not caused by a cyberattack but by an error made while AT&T was expanding its network, the company said late Thursday.

Spokesman Jim Greer said AT&T would continue to assess the outage, which began spiking early Thursday and quickly grew to tens of thousands of reports on the outage-tracking website Downdetector, peaking shortly after 9 a.m. ET. He said service was restored to all customers by about 3 p.m.

"Based on our initial review, we believe that [Thursday’s] outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyberattack," Greer said in an email.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.