AT&T

The three-year compliance plan (PDF) and civil penalty aren’t for this April outage or a nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that blocked more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911.

This outage on August 22nd, 2023, caused over 400 failed 911 calls across Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin in just over an hour.

The names have changed, but the failures continue.

It lasted 12 hours, affected all 50 states, and cut off voice and 5G data for 125 million devices, according to an FCC investigation. The outage caused by a misconfigured network change blocked more than 92 million phones calls, including more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911 emergency services.

The agency is now referring the matter for potential violation of the FCC’s longstanding rule to do better.

Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to AT&T CEO John Stankey with several questions about the cybersecurity attack that resulted in customer data being downloaded from the company’s Snowflake workspace, The Record reports. The senators requested answers by July 29th, and AT&T will respond, according to Reuters.

The senators also sent a letter to Snowflake’s CEO.

Last week, an outage disconnected wireless customers trying to use international roaming, and now we know why,

Syniverse says the problem was not a cyberattack but a “misconfiguration” that flooded its network with a near-infinite loop of error messages. Things are finally back online, and AT&T says it will credit customers for the days — but we haven’t heard more from T-Mobile or Verizon.

TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker has been pushing the company for answers, now that the massive cache of customer data is circulating once again. But although a known hacker claimed responsibility in 2021, AT&T still claims its systems weren’t breached at all — and yet it wouldn’t give Whittaker any other explanation for where the data came from.

After last month’s outage left AT&T customers nationwide without service, the FCC has confirmed to Bloomberg that it has requested “more in-depth information from AT&T concerning the cause, effect, and the company’s response to the incident.”

AT&T has since attributed the outage to the “execution of an incorrect process” and offered customers a $5 credit.

Following its hours-long nationwide disruption on Thursday, AT&T has announced it is reaching out to “potentially impacted customers” and is slapping a whole $5 credit on their accounts, which it says is the “average cost of a full day of service.”

Hooray?

After AT&T wireless service went out for many customers and even first responders across the US Thursday morning, one of the concerns was that the problem, and AT&T’s long delay before making a public statement about it, indicated a possible security breach.

However, according to this tweet, the company thinks it has identified the cause, described as “ the application & execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network.”

ABC News reports the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and other federal agencies, are “urgently investigating” the nation-wide outage to determine if it really was a cyberattack, or a not-so-nefarious technical mishap.

Reuters also has notes from White House spokesperson John Kirby’s comments to reporters:

When asked if government communication was disrupted by AT&T outages, Kirby said: “There was some impact to Commerce (Department) but I don’t know the extent of that, I don’t think it was crippling.” He added that the FirstNet nationwide public safety network was hit but had been fully restored.

U.S. officials have been told that AT&T had no reason to think this was a cybersecurity incident, Kirby said.

The site, which tracks web service outages, is showing blips for Verizon and T-Mobile. Turns out... those are probably just from Verizon and T-Mobile customers trying to call AT&T users.

“We did not experience an outage,” T-Mobile writes.

Its wireless network “remains fully operational,” the company wrote this morning. But its customers could have issues connecting to users of “another carrier” — AKA AT&T, which is suffering a widespread, ongoing outage.

The nationwide AT&T outage that began early, early this morning is still wreaking havoc on the network and has left many customers without mobile service. But there are sporadic reports of people regaining voice and data.

So, how are things looking in your area? Has this totally messed with your day? Is a disruption like this enough to get you thinking about switching providers?

Years after switching to Messages as the default texting app on its Android phones, Verizon says it is “leveling up” the next-gen text message support with a plan to move from its self-hosted servers to Google’s Jibe RCS platform.

There’s no word on when the shift will happen, but it follows similar announcements from AT&T and T-Mobile last year and should allow for a more reliable experience, which Droid-Life notes should enable read receipts and interoperability with RCS on other networks.

AST SpaceMobile, which is building the first space-based cellular network, recently secured new investments from some familiar names: AT&T, Google, and Vodafone.

Adding up to $306.5 million, that’s a hefty vote of confidence in the company’s approach, which would harness a fleet of low-orbit satellites to make direct connections to smartphones — no special equipment required. Who knows? Space 5G could be coming to Android phones sooner than later.

With the new Remo Plus DoorCam 3 Plus LTE, AT&T’s LTE network can serve as a backup if the camera’s Wi-Fi connection drops out. This isn’t the first security cam with cellular connectivity, but it’s nice to see the feature coming to more cameras.

The DoorCam 3 Plus LTE will launch around late March, with pricing available in a similar timeframe, according to AT&T’s Mike Van Horn.