Outage on AT&T service hits thousands
Thousands of AT&T customers in the United States lost cellphone service for hours on Thursday, with officials saying there was no immediate indication of any cybersecurity attack.
AT&T succeeded by midday in winnowing the number of affected customers to a few thousand from a peak of 75,000. A few hours later, the company said it had fully restored service.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that “right now, we’re being told that AT&T has no reason to think that this was a cybersecurity incident”.
Government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, were looking into the incident.
So far, no reason has been given for the outages. But Lee McKnight, an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University, cited the most likely cause of the outage to a cloud misconfiguration, or human error.
AT&T is the country’s largest carrier with more than 240 million subscribers.
Nearly 75,000 AT&T customers were without service during the peak of the outage at midmorning, according to tracking website Downdetector.
Some other cellular providers also reported outages. Downdetector additionally indicated that users on T-Mobile, Verizon and Cricket Wireless were reporting a smaller number of outages.
The issue was clustered in several cities, including Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami, the website said.
AT&T had advised customers to use Wi-Fi calling while it worked to restore network service.
911 chaos
Throughout the day, cities urged residents to find alternative ways of reaching emergency or municipal services, like landlines or phones connected to Wi-Fi.
The San Francisco Fire Department said on social media that it was aware of an issue affecting AT&T users who were trying to call 911. “We are actively engaged and monitoring this,” the fire department was quoted by The New York Times as saying. “If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911, then please try calling from a landline.”
New York Police Department officials told CNN that they were not able to make calls or use e-mail on AT&T phones on Thursday morning unless they were connected to Wi-Fi.
Massachusetts State Police warned people not to test their phone service by placing 911 calls.
“Many 911 centers in the state are getting flooded with calls from people trying to see if 911 works from their cellphone. Please do not do this,” the state police said in a social media post. “If you can successfully place a nonemergency call to another number via your cell service, then your 911 service will also work.”