In a significant outage that left tens of thousands of AT&T customers across the United States without cellular service, the telecommunications giant suffered widespread outage. The company later confirmed that service had been fully restored.
The outage, which peaked between 8 and 9 a.m. ET on Thursday, affected states including Florida, Georgia, Texas and others. At its peak, more than 70,000 AT&T customers reported outages, according to tracking site Downdetector. By 2pm the number of reported outages had fallen to fewer than 5,000.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them,” AT&T said in a statement. The company has not disclosed the cause of the outage or the exact number of customers affected.
In the midst of the outage, there were erroneous reports that 911 services had been impacted. AT&T later clarified that these reports were false. “Nationwide 911 Services are operating normally at this time and our customers are not affected,” a spokesperson for AT&T told The Independent.
The outage also raised concerns about potential cyber threats. However, ABC News reported that federal officials found “no indication of malicious activity,” citing a confidential memo from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The agency is working closely with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage and its impact.
John Kirby, White House national security communications adviser, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security were cooperating in the investigation into the cause of the outage. He stressed that AT&T has no reason to believe the incident was a cybersecurity issue, but a thorough investigation is still underway.
The outage also affected Cricket Wireless customers, with more than 10,000 reports of outages. Meanwhile, Verizon and T-Mobile confirmed that their services were working normally.
The outage had a significant impact on public services, including emergency workers. In Nevada, the Lyon County Emergency Communications Center advised locals not to call 911 with an AT&T device and to instead use a different service provider.
AT&T shares were trading slightly lower Thursday afternoon, down about 2% on the day. Despite the short-term impact, analysts expect the outage to have no long-term effects on the company. “We think that this type of outage can negatively impact financial results in the quarter in which it occurs and cause short-term lost goodwill with customers. However, it does not have a longer-term impact on the business,” said Dave Heger, a senior analyst at Edward Jones.
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