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The ongoing AT&T outage has been crippling for AT&T cellular customers nationwide and it led to over 75,000 outage reports by 9:15 AM on the East Coast.
By lunchtime, AT&T was telling media outlets that 75% of its network had been restored by the widespread nature of the outage prompted investigations from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security looking into whether or not this massive outage was the result of cyber crimes or equipment failure.
Timeline of AT&T Outage
The outage began around 4AM ET on Thursday, according to Digital Trends. It began with a spike of 32,000+ outage reports and exploded from there.
At 11:15, AT&T posted an update on their site saying “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.”
Early in the morning, members of the media from ABC News were briefed by governmental agencies that there are FBI and DHS investigations into the outage. That report states:
As of 5:00 a.m. ET, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported, according to a confidential memo obtained by ABC News, that “the cause of the outage is unknown and there are no indications of malicious activity.” CISA is an agency within DHS tasked with monitoring cyber threats.
Several police departments and municipalities have warned local residents of what they’ve described as a nationwide outage. In turn, officials have urged callers to contact emergency services by alternative means.
AT&T hasn’t released any public statements on whether or not the incident was equipment related or a hack. Jumping to that conclusion without details from officials and people with inside knowledge of the situation would be inappropriate at this time.
Given that this impacts tens and tens of millions of AT&T customers, it seems certain we’ll learn more details in the very near future.