By John BIERS
NEW YORK, Feb 22, 2024 (AFP) – Thousands of AT&T customers in the United States lost cell phone service for hours Thursday, with US officials saying there was no immediate indication of any cybersecurity attack.
AT&T had succeeded by midday in winnowing the number of affected customers to a few thousand from a peak of 75,000. A few hours later near mid-afternoon, the company said it had fully restored all service.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,” AT&T said. “We sincerely apologize to them.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told a White House briefing that “right now, we’re being told that AT&T has no reason to think that this was a cyber security incident.”
The FBI told AFP it “is in contact with AT&T regarding today’s network outage. Should we learn of any malicious activity we will respond accordingly.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “is aware of the reports and we are working closely with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage and its impacts, and stand ready to offer any assistance needed,” said CISA Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Eric Goldstein.
– Configuration problem? –
Nearly 75,000 AT&T customers were without service during the peak of the outage at mid-morning, according to tracking website Downdetector.
The issue was clustered in several cities, including Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami, the website said.
AT&T had advised customers to use Wi-Fi calling while it works to restore wireless service.
Some politicians amplified speculation about a cyberattack, with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio warning on the X social media site about the threat of a China cyberattack.
But cybersecurity experts cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
“While a cyberattack hasn’t been explicitly ruled out or excluded by the telco’s yet, it’s one of a thousand potential reasons something like this might happen,” said Casey Ellis, founder and chief strategy officer of Bugcrowd.
Curtis Fechner, cyber practice leader at Optiv, said a “technical or configuration issue” could be to blame.
“Practically speaking, taking down the network on its own may not achieve much value for a sophisticated threat actor such as a foreign government,” Fechner said. “Most of the value in phone networks is in collecting data for an intelligence community, rather than denying service.”
Downdetector additionally indicated that users on T-Mobile, Verizon and Cricket Wireless were reporting a smaller number of outages.
However, T-Mobile said in a statement that its network was operating normally and that the reports were likely “reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
Similarly, Verizon described its network as “fully operational,” saying “some customers may have experienced issues this morning when calling or texting those served by another carrier.”
Shares of AT&T fell 2.4 percent.
