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Last week, a major cellular crisis hit the United States leaving many cell phone users without service for about half of the day. The outage was just with AT&T users, but it still left many concerned about the cyber safety, fearing that it was caused by a breach in cyber security or the cellphone satellite system. Over 50,000 people were affected by the outages across the country. The cellphone network was ultimately repaired by the late afternoon of the same day on which this occurred, which was last Thursday.
AT&T released a statement confirming this issue was due to a bug that occurred in a software update.
According to the statement, which was published on the AT&T website, the company believes that the outage “was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network.” They reassured us that this was not due to a hacking or disruption to the servers by any means and that all AT&T subscribers information is not believed to be at risk at this time. Despite this, the telephone service provider still launched an investigation to be sure.
AT&T even opened the investigation to partner with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The Agency, or CISA for short, stated they were working closely with AT&T to rule out any notion of threat to their systems. The severity of this idea of having this formal agency stepped in worried and confused people more, but both parties assured this is a normal step to take and is standard protocol. CISA was not the only party working on an investigation, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also had to open their own iterations of an investigation to rule out anything. This was due to the fact that the scope of the outage was grand enough that had there been a cyber security attack, it would have been viewed as an attack on the nation.
Overall, there are as many unanswered questions as there are answered questions. Some residents are still confused and unsure if they believe the issue was merely from a software update issue. Others are trusting the statements released, holding onto faith that the powerholders at be are going to maintain good faith in their investigations and reports.
