AT&T outage update: Company apologizes for massive system failure but rules out cyber attack

“CISA is aware of the reports and we are working closely with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage and its impacts, and stand ready to offer any assistance needed,” The agency’s Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, Eric Goldstein, said in a statement.

“Today’s cell service outage is another example of the critical need to keep AM radio in cars,” the association said in a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter. “When the internet is out, power lines are down and cellphones can’t find a signal, AM radio is there, providing reliable life-saving alerts & updates.”

According to CNN, John Kirby, a National Security spokesman, said the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are looking into the Thursday incident and contacting partners to “see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend a hand to their investigative efforts to figure out what happened there.”

Still, he said, officials are unsure about what caused the widespread outage.

“The bottom line is we don’t have all the answers to that. I mean, this just happened earlier today. And so we’re working very hard to see if we can get to the ground truth of exactly what happened.”

On Thursday, AT&T recommended that affected users get onto WiFi and use that to call people. (Instructions are below.)

But there are plenty of other ways of communicating without a phone connection, too.

You can download maps offline, for instance (Google has long allowed this, and Apple Maps has recently introduced it, too). And you can download music and videos onto your phone ready for any long journeys.

Residents in four Texas cities and other cities in the Midwest and on the east coast reported the most amount of service disruptions, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks that information.

Impacted people lived in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin. Meanwhile, other residents who struggled to get cell service were mainly in Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Miami and Indianapolis.

AT&T pointed affected customers to a special page on its website during the outage. It’s not very detailed:

“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers.”

It’s only a few months since the release of Leave The World Behind, Netflix’s film with a tag line that does feel a little familiar today:

Of course, there is internet, and most phones are still working. But it is a reminder that such an outage is possible.

“Some of you may not have cell phone service this morning,” Mr DeSantis said while speaking to a crowd about the work of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District on Thursday.

“You think about your daily life like…honestly it’s like imagine if we had an EMP attack or something like what would end up happening in this country,” he said. “It’s not necessarily a good thought.”

Probably not, says Ryan French, an astrophysicist.

AT&T has apologised for the widespread outages that affected tens of thousands of consumers, but said that the network failure was not due to a cyber attack.

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