AT&T apologizes for massive system failure but rules out cyber attack

It’s only a few months since the release of Leave The World Behind, Netflix’s film with a tag line that does feel a little familiar today:

Of course, there is internet, and most phones are still working. But it is a reminder that such an outage is possible.

AT&T pointed affected customers to a special page on its website during the outage. It’s not very detailed:

“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.”

You can find the page here.

Residents in four Texas cities and other cities in the Midwest and on the east coast reported the most amount of service disruptions, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks that information.

Impacted people lived in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin. Meanwhile, other residents who struggled to get cell service were mainly in Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Miami and Indianapolis.

On Thursday, AT&T recommended that affected users get onto WiFi and use that to call people. (Instructions are below.)

But there are plenty of other ways of communicating without a phone connection, too.

You can download maps offline, for instance (Google has long allowed this, and Apple Maps has recently introduced it, too). And you can download music and videos onto your phone ready for any long journeys.

According to CNN, John Kirby, a National Security spokesman, said the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are looking into the Thursday incident and contacting partners to “see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend a hand to their investigative efforts to figure out what happened there.”

Still, he said, officials are unsure about what caused the widespread outage.

“The bottom line is we don’t have all the answers to that. I mean, this just happened earlier today. And so we’re working very hard to see if we can get to the ground truth of exactly what happened.”

“Today’s cell service outage is another example of the critical need to keep AM radio in cars,” the association said in a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter. “When the internet is out, power lines are down and cellphones can’t find a signal, AM radio is there, providing reliable life-saving alerts & updates.”

“CISA is aware of the reports and we are working closely with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage and its impacts, and stand ready to offer any assistance needed,” The agency’s Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, Eric Goldstein, said in a statement.

AT&T has sent an array of different messages to affected customers today. But they are mostly along the lines of the below:

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that is happening and some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”

“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,” the company said in an emailed statement. 

“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.”

About 70,000 customers went without service at the peak of the outage, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks the data.

AT&T said it had restored all of its network around 3pm.