Thursday's AT&T Service Outage Caused By Software Upgrade

Sunday, February 25th, 2024 -- 11:27 AM

Starting around 4am ET on Thursday, customers began reporting widespread internet and cell service outages, according to Downdetector.com.

Then, around 8am ET, the outages peaked at 74,000+ reports, with most issues thronged in cities like Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. AT&T said that by late morning, 75% of its network was back up and running, and that the issue was resolved by late Thursday afternoon. First responders said some customers couldn’t get through to 911 operators and urged them to use the ancient device known as a landline instead. The Massachusetts State Police asked people to please stop calling 911 just to check if their service was working, as call centers in the state were inundated with test dials.

AT&T blamed the outage on a software update gone poorly. Before that, there were, naturally, murmurs online of a possible cyberattack, but experts say these kinds of outages almost always stem from boring, non-Mission Impossible-sounding reasons like construction equipment hitting cables or human errors

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.