Over 50,000 AT&T outages were reported at about 7 a.m. ET Thursday, with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to tracking site Downdetector.
AT&T’s network suffered a widespread outages across the country Thursday morning with cellular service and internet down, according to the tracking site Downdetector.
Some Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported outages, though theirs appeared to be less widespread than AT&T.
Over 32,000 AT&T outages were reported by customers at about 4 a.m. ET Thursday. Reports dipped then spiked again to more than 50,000 around 7 a.m., with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to the site.
That number surged to more than 71,000 just before 8 a.m. ET.
A little over 1,100 T-mobile outages and about 3,000 Verizon outages were reported as of 7 a.m. Thursday.
It’s not clear what triggered the service disruption.
Considering the scatter, this doesn’t appear to be a network problem, unless somebody did something really stupid. Magnetic storm?
Edit : Rumor is its a SIM registration issue. But, that doesn’t make too much sense.
I think it’s far more likely to be an attack.
Edit: If it does in fact turn out it’s just AT& T then hanlon’s razor and somebody made a boo boo on change control.
I dunno’, DNS hiccups cause more of an outage than this. If it’s an attack, it’s either a probe that went too far or kiddy’s first ddos script.
If kiddy’s first ddos script can bring half the country’s cell phones down, then I think ATT has some explaining to do.
Oh, I’m sure they would for a serious, in-depth audit. Hopefully this isn’t a Lucille Ball moment.
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If you wanted to attack, you’d be like bin Laden and go after NYC, not Atlanta.
Eric Rudolph has entered the chat
You don’t attack wireless in a town you attack the backbone network. NYC was affected as well.
But now that it seems that only AT&t was affected, change control issues are far more likely
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Social engineering, zero day vulnerabilies, inside operatives. Their security runs tight ships but the towers are on the backbone and unmanned. The hardware isn’t all custom. Vulnerabilities happen. I wouldn’t be shocked if they could. E knocked out by some careful BGP hackery.
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I am affected by the outage. ATT. My phone tells me i’m not registered when i try to make a call. I cant send SMS. On the outage map, it just shows that it is the cell tower that is causing outage.
I won’t go through how you authenticate into a mobile network, but when you can’t your phone is pretty useless. The local cell doesn’t have a thing to do with it.
Idk. Was just reporting my experience. It came back like exactly 12pm CST.
Fixed then! Long outage.
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If a mobile phone is all you have, and you can’t authenticate to the network, you won’t have a way to make a report.