AT&T didn’t say what it believes caused the network disruption nor did it give any details on what steps it took or might be taking to remedy the root cause of today’s outage, but without a doubt government regulators will be getting involved, if they haven’t already, so there will be a lot of pressure to find out what happened and disclose it sooner rather than later. We’ll keep following this story though and bring you anything new that we learn.
2024-02-22T20:20:14.175Z
Just in from AT&T: “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.”
2024-02-22T20:07:54.126Z
Digging into DownDetector’s methodology, a single user can only report a problem on a service once every 24 hours, so any subsequent reports about that service aren’t counted in the updated figures. So what these down detector charts mean is that only the rate of new reporting is slowing.
So, if you have a million people who report their service has been disrupted at 1PM, you’ll see that massive spike, but if the disruption persists for those users who already reported, that ongoing loss of service won’t show up in these charts. Meaning that while the tracking chart shows a marked decrease, it might not mean that it’s over for a lot of folks.
Adding up all the reports on the tracker, it looks like almost 2 million people have reported service disruption in the past 12 hours, and the updated figured don’t mean that all but 3,600 of them have had their service restored. There’s no real way to know that until we get an update from AT&T.
And those are just the ones who initiate a report on DownDetector’s website. Once the dust settles, we’ll probably get a more solid number for how many people were impacted, but this is the largest service outage I have every seen that wasn’t a full on blackout.
2024-02-22T19:52:18.642Z
It looks like AT&T’s network is mostly back online, but there are still more than 3,600 reports as of 2:26PM EST. The sharp decrease in reported issues seems to have plateaued slightly in the last hour, but that might have more to do with the scale of the chart, which hit a peak of just over 74,000 reports. Whatever the technicians are doing seems to have patched whatever the major problem was, but as service comes back in NYC and I’m able to contact friends around the country, the scale of this outage really is enormous.
2024-02-22T19:29:20.056Z
If you want to get a sense of how the outage has been impacting people on the ground, DownDetector’s front page is a fascinating demonstration. The main AT&T network outage in the chart above is mountain of red in the back, starting just before 5AM EST.
Everything else layered over that initial chart are apps and services like Apple Support, Spectrum, Xfinity, Google, Gmail, Starlink (!?), and DoorDash. As everyone slept through the early false peak at around 5:30AM, once everyone starts going to work in the morning and none of their apps work and they don’t know why, they’re thinking the problem is the app itself and not realizing its the whole network.
So, they report that DoorDash is down, or Facebook, or Gmail, so ultimately, the chart above is a real-time snapshot of how this network outage has messed a whole lot of things up, even things that wouldn’t seem to be connected.
But that’s the thing about networks. We’re increasingly connected in ways that we don’t appreciate, and a disruption in the wireless network of a single network provider ripples through everyone’s lives in ways both large and small.
2024-02-22T18:46:12.195Z
I’m not liking that little tick back up at the tail end there, but that’s probably just me.
Look, nature is healing itself. #outage pic.twitter.com/Zy4gJKEjQjFebruary 22, 2024
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2024-02-22T18:44:10.696Z
As of 15 minutes ago, DownDetector is still reporting over 6,000 people experiencing wireless service disruption several hours after reports first started at around 4AM EST.
While we still don’t know the exact cause of the outage, given the severity of the disruption and how long it is taking to resolve, there are going to be a lot of questions that need answering when this is over.
2024-02-22T18:25:00.364Z
Frustrated at your wireless service’s disruption this afternoon? TechRadar’s EIC Lance Ulanoff explores what could have happened, and how the big wireless networks — even those like Verizon who claimed their network were operating normally throughout — need to heed the warning sign this outage is highlighting.
2024-02-22T18:18:42.364Z
2024-02-22T18:18:20.301Z
As of 12:59PM EST, about 10,000 people were reporting an AT&T service disruption on DownDetector, which backs up AT&T’s statement that the company had restored a substantial portion of its network by the early afternoon on the east coast.
2024-02-22T18:09:40.052Z
AT&T just issued a new statement on the widespread network outage that has taken down tens of thousands of customers’ wireless service, as reported to DownDetector and other monitoring sites.
At 11:15AM EST, an update was posted on AT&T’s website that says: “Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers.”