WASHINGTON D.C. (WJET/WFXP) — The Federal Communication Commission has released its report detailing its findings over the massive AT&T outage that began at 2:45 a.m. on February 22, 2024.
The outage affected over 125 million devices, blocked 92 million voice calls, and prevented more than 25,000 calls to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs or 911 call centers). The ‘sunny day’ outage lasted at least 12 hours before service was fully restored. During this time, all voice and 5G data services for AT&T wireless customers were unavailable, including devices that were on SOS mode. The outage also affected any wireless customers utilizing mobile virtual network operators and other customers roaming on AT&T Mobility’s network. A Mobile Virtual Network Operator essentially functions as a wireless communication service provider that does not possess its wireless network infrastructure but rather utilizes the infrastructure of another telecommunications provider.
The outage also cut off service to devices used by public safety, the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet). While AT&T prioritized the restoration of the FirstNet services, they failed to inform FirstNet customers of the outage until three hours after it began and one hour after it was restored.
Thankfully, the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system was still operational during the outage. In fact, six WEA messages were broadcast during the 12-hour outage.
When you sign-up for wireless service, you expect it will be available when you need it – especially for emergencies. This ‘sunny day’ outage prevented consumers across the country from communicating, including by blocking 911 calls, and stopped public safety personnel from using FirstNet. We take this incident seriously and are working to provide accountability for this lapse in service and prevent similar outages in the future.
Jessica Rosenworcel | FCC Chairwoman
The FCC says that the outage was caused after AT&T implemented a network change that contained an equipment configuration error. The report also goes on to say that the outage was due to several factors including, “…a lack of adherence to AT&T Mobility’s internal procedures, a lack of peer review, a failure to adequately test after installation, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network, a lack of controls to mitigate the effects of the outage once it began, and a variety of system issues that prolonged the outage once the configuration error had been remedied.”
As a result of the failures during the outage in February, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has referred this matter to the Enforcement Bureau for potential violations of FCC rules.
The report comes as the FCC investigates a recently disclosed data breach, which exposed millions of customers’ data.
According to a recent filing with the SEC, AT&T says they learned that the hacker accessed and copied AT&T call logs on April 19, 2024. The breach was said to have accessed and copied files containing AT&T records of customers’ call and text interactions that took place between May 1 and October 31, 2022, as well as January 2, 2023.
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