An AT&T cellular outage lasting more than 12 hours that prevented subscribers from accessing services including 911 was caused by misconfigured hardware and a failure to follow standard commissioning procedures.
What caused the AT&T outage? The UT Dallas professor explains his theory
Or so the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says about the February 22 incident, which affected AT&T wireless customers in every US state, plus Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The outage disrupted access to voice and 5G data services across the country, as The Register reported at the time. It took AT&T at least 12 hours to fully restore service, during which more than 25,000 attempted 911 calls failed to get through.
Based on its investigations, the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau today referred the matter to its Enforcement Bureau for potential violations of FCC rules, which could result in fines for America's second-largest wireless carrier.
In its published findings [PDF] about the outage, the FCC says it was caused by an AT&T Mobility employee adding a "misconfigured network element" to the production network, intended to increase capacity, during a routine overnight maintenance window.
