The investigation into that major cell phone outage AT&T saying a software update gone wrong caused the nationwide problem.
There was some concern this might have been a attack. The FBI even launched an investigation. But AT&T says this was self inflicted, that this was an error from a network expansion that went bad.
In fact, it’s still unclear just how many of he’s 100 million US customers lost service. But this impacted tons of people across the country, from LA to Chicago to Dallas and far beyond it. The website down detector says it peaked at 70,000 self reported outages at 10:00 a.m. On Thursday.
That’s just cases reported to the site, though. And to be clear, this is not just an issue because some people couldn’t call their budies. In a lot of cases, this actually snarled some emergency services. Some 911 calls would connect and then disconnect. It left dispatchers having to figure out who called or why or if they needed help.
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The San Francisco fire Department ended up telling callers if they were having problems, they should call 911 using a landline. We know that’s not always possible. And then on the flip side, Massachusetts state police said they were flooded with calls from people who were testing if 911 still worked. And it did work for them. But then the dispatchers were tied up answering all those calls.
It really highlights how much we lie in these networks and what can go wrong if they disappear.