The AT&T Blackout, One of the Biggest Cellular Network Outages in Recent Memory, Wasn’t Due to Hackers or Solar Flares But to Human Error

 
Everyone chimed in: The Space Weather Prediction Center (yes, this is a thing and it’s part of the National Weather Service which, in turn is part of NOAA, or the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), said that, while there had been several solar flares, they were “unlikely to be related” to the blackout. The U.S. government began to investigate the possibility of a cyber-attack as the cause but that, too, turned out to be a false lead.
Rather, it was human error that occurred during the upgrade and expantion of the telecommunication giant’s mobile network.
“Our initial review of the cause of Thursday’s outage indicates it was due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network,” said the company’s CEO, John Stankey, in a memorandum to employees.
A QAnon conspiracy theorist commented on what it termed “[P]redictive programming from the Netflix movie ‘Leave The World Behind,’ adding the movie’s slogan: “No internet. No phones. No going back to normal.”
Network outages on this scale are quite uncommon.
Just over one year ago, on February 13, 2023, customers of AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless experienced intermittent network outages and just for several hours. The trouble was traced to what T-Mobile termed a “3rd party fiber interruption issue.”
In 2020, T-Mobile subscribers across the United States suffered a service outage (primarily voice and text) due to routing issues. This too was just for several hours.
In addition, T-Mobile experienced a voice and data outage on November 9, 2009, again only for several hours, caused by a system software error that affected 5% of its customer base.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)