The Riverside Press-Enterprise
AT&T outage leads to U.S. probe
Homeland Security, FBI looking into if cellular interruptions were a cyberattack
AT&T Inc. said its mobile network has been restored after a widespread, hourslong outage Thursday as the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security began investigating why hundreds of thousands of wireless subscribers lost service.
Wireless phone service customers from multiple carriers started reporting problems in the early hours of the morning, but it soon became clear that AT&T’S network was the culprit. AT&T customers filed more than 1.5 million outage reports on service-tracking website Downdetector. The cause of the hourslong disruption is not clear.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,”
Kim Hart, a company spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. “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.”
The federal government is investigating whether the outage was caused by a cyberattack, according to two U.S. officials familiar
with the situation, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
The Federal Communications Commission also has been in touch with AT&T to try and ascertain the cause, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
“DHS and the FBI are looking into this as well, working with the tech industry, these network providers, to see what we can do from a federal perspective to enhance their investigative efforts to figure out what happened here,” Kirby said.
AT&T outages were reported in New York, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago and Dallas. The service disruption upended communications with emergency responders, and officials took to social media urging AT&T customers to use landlines to call 911 for emergencies.
With about 87 million subscribers, AT&T is the third-largest U.S. retail wireless carrier, behind Verizon Communications Inc. and T-mobile U.S. Inc., according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Verizon and T-mobile both said their.
The impact was felt far and wide. Emma Smits, an AT&T customer, was on the Metra express train into Chicago. Normally, the public relations account executive spends the hourlong commute preparing for client calls, pitching reporters and catching up on overnight tasks. Not Thursday.
“I couldn’t cross anything off my work to-do list,” said Smits, who watched her fellow commuters turn their phones off and on to try and catch a cellular signal in a futile attempt to send emails or get work done.
Workarounds abounded, sending some back to simpler times. Vanessa Stowe had to screenshot directions to a morning meeting “like it’s 2009 Mapquest.” Sarah Kittel, a communications strategist, had to connect to a nearby restaurant’s Wifi to pay for parking.
“So much of our work and lives depend, sadly or otherwise, on our ability to be reached or reach others at a touch of a button,” Kittel said. “That simply didn’t happen this morning.”
Cate Luzio, traveling from New York to Washington for a big client event, was more blunt: “It was a mess.”
Among those impacted were employees of the FBI. In an email to all staff reviewed by Bloomberg, the agency’s Information Technology Branch said “a nationwide cell service outage is preventing some Google Pixel devices from connecting to cellular coverage. Some users have been able to reconnect to the network by rebooting their Pixel (press and hold the Power button, then press ‘Restart’).”