Recently, AT&T has attracted the attention of users and the technology community due to the inconvenience caused by network problems and large-scale data leaks, which not only shocked the company's loyal users, but also raised some serious questions about data privacy and security. The cyber attack exposed nearly all users’ call and text message records. The cellular connectivity outage caused quite a stir, as the outage lasted for several hours and affected more than 70,000 users. Recently, a report from the Federal Communications Commission shed light on this problem and its root causes.
Reports reveal the cause of a massive outage on AT&T's network in February was more than just a glitchy software update.
Over the past few months, AT&T's network has been in the spotlight due to ongoing network issues. In February, the company had a major connectivity outage that left users across the United States without connectivity for hours, and the extent of the impact appears to be continuing, as a report from the Federal Communications Commission provided details about the nationwide outage and suggested in its findings that the problem was unavoidable.
The outage affected about 125 million devices, nearly all of the carrier's customers, and blocked 92 million voice calls, according to the FCC report. This includes 25,000 emergency calls to 911. Although AT&T claimed to have resolved the issue within two hours, it took approximately 12 hours for service and connectivity to be fully restored. Even the SOS mode of the device cannot be used, resulting in emergencies that cannot be handled in a timely manner.
The First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) was unable to receive service for the first two hours, causing emergency communications channels to be severely clogged. The FCC reported that the outage occurred because AT&T made changes to its network that included misconfiguration of the equipment.
While the primary cause of the outage was a glitched software update, the report suggests there was a bigger cause. The report states that the company did not conduct necessary internal testing before the update went live, nor did it adhere to necessary internal processes such as peer review, so the scale of the glitch and its impact were unavoidable. The report highlights reasons for the protracted problem, including:
The agency believes that the scope and duration of the outage was the result of multiple factors, all of which can be attributed to AT&T Mobility, including misconfiguration, failure to follow AT&T Mobility's internal procedures, lack of peer review, inadequate post-installation testing, insufficient laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network, and lack of controls. TMobility's internal procedures, lack of peer review, insufficient post-installation testing, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls in place to ensure changes affecting the core network were approved, lack of controls to mitigate the impact of the outage once it began, and various system issues that prolonged the outage after the configuration errors were remedied.
Due to the widespread impact of the outage, the FCC has referred the matter to law enforcement to determine whether FCC regulations were violated, and it appears that this issue may continue for some time.