This afternoon, AT&T confirmed it has restored wireless service following a major outage that disrupted its network for customers across the United States for much of Thursday. “We sincerely apologize,” the operator said of the subscribers in a statement on its website. “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.”
The company has not yet offered any explanation for the cause of the outage. ABC News reported that the situation led the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to begin “urgently” investigating whether the carrier was the target of a cyberattack. Hopefully AT&T will offer some clarification on the root cause soon, as there will be many questions about how their network was offline for so long.
The FCC has already said it is investigating what happened and has been in contact with public safety authorities. Some localities issued emergency safety alerts as the outage prevented calls to 911 in certain cases, urging residents not to dial 911 just to see if calls were connected.
AT&T's main competitors, Verizon and T-Mobile, issued separate statements Thursday to emphasize that their networks were operating normally. The severity of wireless downtime that AT&T experienced today is rare. T-Mobile suffered a major outage a year ago, but it happened in the middle of the night, while AT&T's problems lasted through much of the business day and were more disruptive to many.
