AT&T restores wireless service to all affected customers

Reporter: Jolena Esperto Writer: Nicholas Karsen
Published: Updated:
cell phone outages
Luismt94 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

AT&T restores wireless service to all affected customers.

AT&T hasn’t explained what caused the outage. However, an expert WINK News spoke with said some major settings of the network may have gotten tinkered with, and something changed that wasn’t supposed to.

He also said that he’s seen a lot more than tens of thousands of people would have been impacted by a nationwide outage, like the one that happened on Thursday.

“We’re here, and all the kids are up north and stuff like that it’s communication,” Neal Riordan.

“Book course that and I couldn’t call Apple Care to find out what to do because I couldn’t use my phone. So I was really alert,” said Donna Taylor.

The news of the recovery came at around 3:30 p.m., Thursday.

“It started in the wee hours the morning we started hearing reports. The numbers seem too low for me. You’re hearing 5,080 100,000 people, but you’re also hearing about it being nationwide. And I’m hearing tons and tons of people affected. It seems to be much higher than the one to 2% of people that, it kind of sounded like in the beginning,” said Alan Crowetz, a cyber security expert at Infostream, inc.

Crowetz explained what happened on Thursday may make people more aware they need to prepare.

“I’m always worried that one day one of these malicious actors, which sometimes are foreign countries, like China, or North Korea or Iran, they are supposedly tied into our infrastructure, they have a lot of ability to attack us. They want to attack us at certain times. There’s a lot of belief that they’re waiting for the right moment, you know, to do things like this. And so this is good practice,” said Crowetz.

The mysterious outage began affecting customers throughout the U.S. at around 4 a.m., with approximately 74,000 being involved at the height of the outage, according to Downdetector.com.

A statement regarding the outages released by AT&T stated, “We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”

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