A recently completed U.S. government investigation sheds more light on the major AT&T outage that occurred on February 22, 2024, and also reveals a somewhat embarrassing cause.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report highlighted the significant impact of the outage, which blocked more than 92 million calls, including 25,000 attempts to reach 911 emergency services.
The FCC criticized AT&T for failing to follow best practices, such as thoroughly testing, reviewing and approving network changes before they are implemented.
FCC investigating AT&T’s February 2024 outage
The outage affected 125 million devices across all 50 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Alarmingly, it took more than 12 hours to fully resolve, leaving many without connectivity during peak hours.
In addition to AT&T customers, customers with carriers that use AT&T’s network and those who use the network for roaming were also affected. The outage also disrupted public safety communications on the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet).
AT&T acknowledged that the outage was due to an update related to a network expansion. The configuration error occurred three minutes after a network change was made, causing the network to go into “protect mode” and disconnect all devices.
However, the FCC accuses AT&T of deeper problems, including inadequate peer reviews, insufficient lab testing and a lack of safeguards to prevent such outages.
AT&T has taken steps to prevent future outages, but the FCC has already referred the matter to its Enforcement Bureau for possible violations of its rules. FCC Chair Jessia Rosenworcel stressed the importance of network reliability:
“When you sign up for wireless service, you expect it to be available when you need it, especially in emergencies… We take this incident seriously and are working to address this service shortcoming and prevent similar outages in the future.”
