February AT&T Outage Blocked 92 Million Calls FCC Says

WASHINGTON, July 22, 2024 – An AT&T outage in February blocked more than 92 million calls, more than 25,000 of which were 911 calls, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

The agency released on Monday a report on the incident. It comes just over a week after AT&T made public a massive data breach in which call logs and numbers of millions of subscribers were leaked, which the FCC is also investigating.

The Feb. 22 outage was caused by a “misconfigured network element” that triggered an automatic shutdown of all AT&T’s wireless connections. The company reversed the change and reconnected most subscribers within 2 hours, but the network remained congested for another 10 hours with the high volume of devices trying to get back online.

The FCC said it had referred the case to its Enforcement Bureau for potential violations of agency outage rules.

The incident also affected FirstNet, the nationwide first responder network for which AT&T is the government’s contractor. AT&T prioritized FirstNet infrastructure and got that network functioning normally shortly, reversing the initial change. The FCC report noted that the company did not notify FirstNet customers of the outage until nearly an hour after the network was back online.

“This ‘sunny day’ outage prevented consumers across the country from communicating, including by blocking 911 calls, and stopped public safety personnel from using FirstNet,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “We take this incident seriously and are working to provide accountability for this lapse in service and prevent similar outages in the future.”

As to company shortcomings, the FCC agency pointed to what it called insufficient precautions on AT&T’s end, both in post-installation testing of network changes and in managerial safeguards to ensure changes get approval before being implemented. 

The report noted “post-outage, AT&T has implemented additional steps for peer review and adopted procedures to ensure that maintenance work cannot take place without confirmation that required peer reviews have been completed.”

An AT&T spokesperson said: “We have implemented changes to prevent what happened in February from occurring again. We fell short of the standards that we hold ourselves to, and we regret that we failed to meet the expectations of our customers and the public safety community.”

The report could serve as ammunition for other wireless carriers looking to convince the FCC not to award FirstNet a nationwide license in the 4.9 GHz spectrum band. A group headed by a former FirstNet Authority vice chair proposed the idea in response to an agency inquiry on how to improve usage in the band, which is currently set aside for local public safety agencies.

Competitors like Verizon and T-Mobile assert the move would amount to a giveaway of valuable spectrum to AT&T, which can use dormant FirstNet spectrum for commercial purposes under its contract. A group formed by the companies and other carriers commissioned a study that valued the 4.9 GHz band at $14 billion.