What caused the AT&T outage? Here's what we know

Published: Feb 22, 2024 Duration: 00:03:33 Category: News & Politics

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Is working, it is up and running. It was from about three o'clock yesterday morning all the way to around noon. And this morning, we're learning new details about just what caused that major outage for so many AT&T customers. Yeah. Really? Inconvenient service has been restored this morning. But many of you probably woke up and realized you couldn't make a phone call or send a text. Take a look at this map. It shows all the cities impacted by the outage. AT&T says up to 70,000 people were affected. That is the only the number of customers who reported it. So likely more the actual number is much higher. I'm sure. All right, Chris out live in our newsroom with more this morning. And Chris, we now know according to at and T what may have caused this outage. We do have a cause mark that service is restored this morning, but we now know it was a botched software upgrade that caused outages across at and T network, not a cyber attack. As many speculated AT&T said there was a coding error while trying to expand their network and it left thousands disconnected from phone and internet service on their mobile devices. For much of the day, the website down detector reports outages hit a peak of 74,000 around nine in the morning. And again, that's just those that were reported, but all was restored by 330 in the afternoon. That's nearly 12 hours after the first reported outages. It gave customers a taste of life before smartphones, medstar said their paramedics had to use those old school map books because their GPS systems wouldn't work and passengers trying to make it to DFW International for a flight were left in limbo because rideshare services couldn't connect and those drivers missed out on income had no service. I couldn't work. I was heading home. I live two hours away and come out here to work for a few days and then I head back. So all sorts of disruption AT&T did apologize to customers and said they are taking steps to ensure it won't happen again. Now that we know it was a technical issue, you may have heard that speculation that it was a solar phenomenon causing it. And for that Mario Ruiz is here to explain what's happening on the surface of the sun. Mario. Yeah. You know, really interesting. I thought it'd be a fun way to kind of introduce some space weather chat into our mornings. Right? Who doesn't love that? I do want to s size that space weather and earth weather are not the same thing. We're experts in earth weather, but of course, science is always fun. So here's a look at satellite imagery. This is the sun y'all. And during that solar flare, you can see that really bright spot. That's just one of them. The other one you can kind of see there on the bottom of the left hand of the sun. Ok. So these were our two major solar flares that happened. We have had a total of three this week, but I wanna focus on the first two that happened. The first one was Wednesday afternoon and evening around 507 local time. The second one happened overnight Wednesday into Thursday right after midnight. So that one was the one that they're like, oh, that could have caused the issues with the outage. But let's talk about what it is. This the flare is actually an eruption of energy from the sun. It can last anywhere for minutes to hours. Our three signifies a strong solar filler. That's just uh a space weather scale and that does not happen very frequent. So this week just happened to be coincidence, but this actually can dis rub high frequency radio signals, radar and GPS. But this can only happen on the sun lit side of the earth which we were not at when these happened. So a space weather event did not cause the outage because cell phones also happen to be low frequency. So you don't have to worry about that in the future mark. So no space lasers either. No, not this time. All right. Thank you for that. Maybe next time. Well, this morning.

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