A massive nationwide outage hit AT&T, FirstNet, and MVNOs that use AT&T’s network on Thursday Morning of February 22nd. The network should be back to fully operational now, according to AT&T.
The outage appears to have started around 4am Eastern, with reports of outage peaking around 9am, according to DownDetector.
The cause, according to one inside source, may have been what they described as a “server migration gone wrong”. As with most single-source tips, this is just a guess right now, so take that with a grain of salt.
The outage affected both standard AT&T customers and FirstNet customers. FirstNet is AT&T’s special “built for first responders” network that gives priority access to the network at all times. Naturally, it being down is a big issue since many first responders rely on it for critical communications.
This outage follows the recent outage of a similar nature by T-Mobile, which saw texts and calls affected and was the result of network maintenance/updates.
So far no official word has been given as to why the outage has occurred. Reports of T-Mobile and Verizon also going down at the same time appear to be a mistake, and simply a result of AT&T’s outage causing a ripple effect due to customers assuming outages because they could not contact AT&T customers.
Both Verizon and T-Mobile have shared that their network was unaffected by the outage.
We’ll be sure to keep this article updated as we learn more.
