The FCC said it was aware of the reported outages and its Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau was actively investigating the incident.
“We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers,” the agency said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
White House national security communications adviser John Kirby said DHS and FBI
were also looking into the incident and working with network providers to “see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend hands to their investigative efforts.”
“We’re going to look at this really hard,” he told reporters Thursday. “We’re going to work with industry to see what we can see we can find out, but right now, we’re being told AT&T has no reason to think that this was a cybersecurity incident.”
Kirby added he was not aware of any “chatter”
coming from state or nonstate actors ahead of the outage.
The outages appeared to start around 4 a.m. EST, with more than 70,000 outages reported by 8 a.m., according to the tracking website DownDetector.
By Thursday afternoon, AT&T said it had restored wireless service to all affected customers.
“We sincerely apologize to them,” the telecommunications company said in a statement. “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.”
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
