The massive AT&T outage in February was much more serious than previously thought, according to an FCC report laying out everything that went wrong.
Back on February 22 this year, AT&T suffered a massive outage after a botched network update. Now, months later, the full scale of the outage has been revealed — and it’s much bigger than we thought at the time.
“All voice and 5G data services for AT&T wireless customers were unavailable, affecting more than 125 million devices, blocking more than 92 million voice calls, and preventing more than 25,000 calls to 911 call centers,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in its report.
The 911 failures are the biggest problem here for reasons that are easy to understand. There’s nothing worse than trying to reach 911 in an emergency and being unable to get through. The FCC report does show that AT&T attempted to restore FirstNet (First Responder Network Authority) first before residential and commercial AT&T users, which sounds like the correct way to go about it.
However, the FCC also criticized AT&T for several failures on top of failing to test the implementation of the network change. The FCC pointed to a lack of oversight and controls to ensure test that processes were followed or that the processes themselves were insufficient.
