AT&T says outage not caused by cyberattack

AT&T said Thursday evening that a nationwide outage earlier in the day was not caused by a cyberattack, based on an initial review.

“Based on our initial review, we believe the outage was caused by the application & execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack,” the company said in a post on X, formerly Twitter

“We are continuing our assessment to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.”

The company in an earlier post Thursday evening said that “[a]ll wireless service has been restored” and apologized for the outage.

On Thursday morning, thousands of outages affecting the wireless giant’s network were reported, according to DownDetector, mostly concentrated in Houston, Atlanta, Miami and Chicago. The outages seemed to begin early in the morning and rose to over 70,000 at 8 a.m., according to the tracking site. 

“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them,” AT&T said in a statement to The Hill early Thursday. “We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI were investigating the outages. The Federal Communications Commission also said its Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau was actively investigating the incident.

White House national security adviser John Kirby said authorities were also looking into the outages and working with network providers to “see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend hands to their investigative efforts.”

“We’re going to look at this really hard,” he told reporters Thursday. “We’re going to work with industry to see what we can see … but right now, we’re being told AT&T has no reason to think that this was a cybersecurity incident.”