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AT&T reveals the reason for its massive blackout, and it was not a cyberattack

AT&T reveals the reason for its massive blackout, and it was not a cyberattack

We are still recovering from the scale and widespread impact of yesterday's massive AT&T outage, and information is now coming to light about the causes of the cellular coverage outage. And it seems that the culprit was an old technical error.

“Based on our initial review, we believe that today's outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used while we were expanding our network, not by a cyberattack,” AT&T said in an update posted on its website.

“We continue our assessment of today's outage to ensure we continue to provide the service our customers deserve,” the statement continued. Around 2 million reports were filed on Downdetector yesterday, as the incident progressed.

Spokesman Jim Greer told the Washington Post that AT&T would continue to monitor the situation. The Post also reports that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission are also investigating.

More to come

AT&T will make any necessary adjustments to the missing service due to this issue once the issue is fully resolved. Thank you for your patience. ^NahiraLFebruary 22, 2024

Yesterday's cellular network outage was the largest in recent memory, and the problems apparently began around 3:30 a.m. ET, as the United States was waking up. We saw reports of problems in several states and calls were made to 911. also shocked.

While there were also reports of connection issues from Verizon and T-Mobile customers, it appears they were primarily related to communicating with people at AT&T, so the main outage appears to have affected only one carrier.

Of course, this was a huge inconvenience for AT&T customers, who were unable to make personal or work calls while the incident occurred. AT&T has hinted that some compensation will be offered, but so far we do not have any details about it.

There's certainly a lot more to come as AT&T evaluates what went wrong and how it can prevent it from happening again. In the meantime, you might want to make sure you know how to set up Wi-Fi calling on your smartphone.