Written by Aditya Soni and David Shepherdson
(Reuters) – AT&T issued a statement to all affected customers on Thursday, hours after a cellphone outage disrupted calls and text messages for thousands of U.S. users and prompted an investigation by the federal agency. announced that wireless service had been restored.
The wireless carrier, whose 5G network covers about 290 million people across the U.S., suffered service interruptions for more than 10 hours.
“We are taking steps to ensure that our customers never experience an incident like this again in the future,” AT&T said in a statement on its website.
The Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the incident, and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it was working with AT&T to determine the cause.
White House Press Secretary John Kirby said the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were investigating the AT&T outage. CISA is a unit of DHS.
“We have heard that AT&T has no reason to believe this is a cyber or security incident,” Kirby said, adding that the FCC has been in contact with the company.
“But the bottom line is we don't have all the answers,” he said of the causes of the disorder.
AT&T declined to comment on the FCC's investigation into the incident.
The company did not disclose the reason for the outage or the number of users affected.
AT&T stock fell 2.4% in afternoon trading. About 3,255 outages were reported at around 2:47 p.m. ET (1947 GMT), down from more than 70,000 earlier in the day, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.
Doug Madley, a director at Internet analytics firm Kentic, said while it's unclear to the outside world what exactly happened at AT&T, he has no doubt it was the result of malicious activity.
“I suspect this was some kind of attack,” he said in a telephone interview. “Most of these things are like software pushes that result in some kind of failure.”
The outage affected people's ability to dial 911 and contact emergency services, according to posts on the X social media platform by government agencies in several U.S. cities.
“We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T Wireless customers' ability to make and receive calls (including 911),” the San Francisco Fire Department said in a statement.
The Prince William County Police Department in Virginia and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina posted similar statements on their platforms.
Users of Verizon, T-Mobile, and UScellular also faced outages, but the impact was more limited than what AT&T reported, Downdetector showed.
Other companies said their networks were working normally and that the outage could be related to customers trying to connect to other networks.
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said in a post on X that he has contacted AT&T for the latest information.
“Florida's law enforcement agencies are doing everything they can to keep people safe, and we want to keep you informed of what AT&T is doing to bring 911 services back fully online as soon as possible.” I hope they will provide it.”
In 2021, regulators settled for $19.5 million an investigation into T-Mobile's outages during the pandemic that lasted more than 12 hours and resulted in more than 20,000 failed 911 calls.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni and Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; David Shepherdson, Raphael Sattar and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Additional reporting by Nirtpal Timsina, Arshiya Bajwa and Priyanka G; Shonak Dasgupta; (edited by Anil D'Silva, Arun Koyur, Jonathan Oatis and Alexander Smith)
