Yesterday, AT&T experienced one of the biggest network blackouts in a hot minute. Tens of thousands of customers were left unable to call, text, or use the internet for a number of hours. Whilst other networks such as Verizon and T-Mobile were affected it wasn’t as bad, but the widespread outages caused a minor panic with conspiracy theorists blaming it all on Russia. A day later and it seems we now have some answers as to its cause.
What was the cause of the outage
Spoiler: It wasn’t Russia, so if you were concerned that the day had finally come and we were about to go into world war 3 you can breathe a sigh of relief, that’s not happening for at least another week. Theories that it was a cyberattack were nothing more than your average conspiracy nonsense that gets posted on X (formerly Twitter) daily.
But if it wasn’t a cyberattack then what was it? The truth, as usual, is a lot more mundane. According to a statement released by AT&T, the company found the disruption to be “caused by application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network.” It was a mistake, a big one, but a mistake nonetheless. I told you it was a mundane explanation (not that I wanted it to be a cyberattack from Russia).
Are services up and running again?
AT&T had three quarters of its network back up and running by 11:15 a.m. ET. By the mid-afternoon the company confirmed that the service was back online for everyone affected.