(IntegrityPress.org) – After a lengthy investigation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has referred the matter of a February AT&T outage to its Enforcement Bureau. In February, AT&T suffered a wireless outage that persisted for 12 hours and affected customers across the country. The outage blocked 92 million phone calls, including 25,000 calls to 911.
The five-month-long investigation found that on February 22, 2024, all 5G and voice services suffered a total failure for the 12-hour period. It not only impacted customers in the United States, but also those in Puerto Rico and even the U.S. Virgin Islands. The FCC report pointed to multiple errors committed by AT&T staff, including the failure to follow established procedures during a maintenance period.
According to the report, the outage was caused by an AT&T employee attempting to add a faulty element to the network during a standard nightly maintenance period. The element was intended to increase network capacity. The worker did not follow AT&T protocol, which would have involved checking the addition by other colleagues, who may have been able to spot the fault in the new element. Instead, the fault went undetected by humans but caused an automatic network shutdown designed to protect the fault from spreading across the network.
AT&T was able to identify and pull out the faulty addition within two hours, but it still took a further 10 hours to restore network functionality fully. Complete restoration was made more difficult and protracted because so many customers attempted to re-register their phones once they realized that they had no service.
The FCC’s report highlighted multiple failings on the part of AT&T. It recommended that network providers take greater care to always follow their own procedures and industry best practices. It also advised improving their network controls to “mitigate configuration errors” such as the one that caused February’s outage. The FCC says that it plans to give all its customers a full day’s credit for its network as a form of compensation for the day’s outage.
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