Yesterday, AT&T experienced a significant outage that impacted tens of thousands of customers, resulting in a lack of cellular service. An investigation was conducted to determine the cause, whether it was a technical error or a cyberattack. It was found that the issue was due to a technical error and not a cyberattack.
Following an investigation into the hours-long service disruption, AT&T stated that the issue was not the result of a cyberattack but rather a mistake on their end. Although not providing extensive details, the carrier attributed the incident to an update error.
In a statement to the Associated Press, AT&T explained:
Based on our initial assessment, we believe that the outage was caused by the incorrect implementation of a process during network expansion, and not by a cyber attack.
During the peak of the outage, there were 73,000 reported incidents on the DownDetector outage tracker. While the majority of impacted users were AT&T customers, other carriers utilizing AT&T’s network were also affected, including Cricket Wireless, which had 9,000 reports of issues.