AT&T says service has been restored to all customers affected by nationwide service outages.
ABC News is reporting it was a software update that went wrong according to sources who are familiar with the investigation into the AT&T Wireless outage. There had been concerns that it was a cyber attack similar to how Israeli telecom has been targeted by Iran and its proxies in recent months. But sources are telling ABC News there was nothing nefarious or malicious in the end and that it was simply computers not responding properly to an update.
AT&T has apologized for the outages and says it’s taking steps to ensure it does not happen again, but the federal government wants to know why this happened. DHS and the FBI are looking into this as well – working with the tech industry – network providers – to see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend a hand to their investigative efforts. The system that handles 911 calls was affected by the outages. It also affected Firstnet – a nationwide network for first responders and police communication
While most AT&T customers in South Central Illinois didn’t have phone service, the 911 systems did not appear to be impacted. AT&T has not said how many millions of its customers were impacted, but a number of large cities from coast to coast were among those impacted.
