February 22, 2024
Did you have no cell service this morning?
Chances are – if you’re an AT&T customer, you were in that boat. And now the federal government is getting involved to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on. Because AT&T isn’t saying much.
So if you’re not a customer – here’s what’s going on. Starting overnight last night AT&T customers started reporting that they were getting an SOS notification on their phones – which means there is no cellular service. The peak of the outage for AT&T’s 5g network with covers about 290 million people across the country happened about 9:15 this morning. By 11 am AT&T said service was restored for three-quarters of the network and by this afternoon – AT&T said all customers had their service restored.
But the problem is – some of those customers with no cell service were emergency centers in several states. And that was preventing people from making emergency calls from their cell phones. Plus local government agencies were also reporting problems including police and fire departments, the First Net nationwide public safety network and even the Department of Commerce had limited or no service. And that’s a problem for the federal government.
So what caused all this? That’s the other problem. AT&T hasn’t been very open with what happened. The company only put out this super short statement saying “We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. 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.” So now the feds are getting involved. Officially — the FCC, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are now investigating. At this point – the national security spokesperson says AT&T told the government they don’t have any reason to believe this was a cybersecurity or hacking incident so far.
