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- cross-posted to:
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Over 50,000 AT&T outages were reported at about 7 a.m. ET Thursday, with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to tracking site Downdetector.
AT&T’s network suffered a widespread outages across the country Thursday morning with cellular service and internet down, according to the tracking site Downdetector.
Some Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported outages, though theirs appeared to be less widespread than AT&T.
Over 32,000 AT&T outages were reported by customers at about 4 a.m. ET Thursday. Reports dipped then spiked again to more than 50,000 around 7 a.m., with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to the site.
That number surged to more than 71,000 just before 8 a.m. ET.
A little over 1,100 T-mobile outages and about 3,000 Verizon outages were reported as of 7 a.m. Thursday.
It’s not clear what triggered the service disruption.
Considering the scatter, this doesn’t appear to be a network problem, unless somebody did something really stupid. Magnetic storm?
Edit : Rumor is its a SIM registration issue. But, that doesn’t make too much sense.
I think it’s far more likely to be an attack.
Edit: If it does in fact turn out it’s just AT& T then hanlon’s razor and somebody made a boo boo on change control.
I dunno’, DNS hiccups cause more of an outage than this. If it’s an attack, it’s either a probe that went too far or kiddy’s first ddos script.
If kiddy’s first ddos script can bring half the country’s cell phones down, then I think ATT has some explaining to do.
Oh, I’m sure they would for a serious, in-depth audit. Hopefully this isn’t a Lucille Ball moment.
Removed by mod
If you wanted to attack, you’d be like bin Laden and go after NYC, not Atlanta.
Eric Rudolph has entered the chat
You don’t attack wireless in a town you attack the backbone network. NYC was affected as well.
But now that it seems that only AT&t was affected, change control issues are far more likely
Those backbone exchange points are pretty well protected. I walk past the one in Boston pretty frequently. You’d never know it was there by looking at the building. But the actual datacenter is deep inside the building somewhere, probably the basement. Very hard to get to.
Although now that I’m looking at the building on Google maps, it looks like the generators and HVAC are all on the roof? I don’t think I can tell what belongs to the datacenter, but if those do, you could easily take them out with a couple drones.
Of course, they would just fail over to their alternate site in Lowell if anything happened to Boston. And if that site went offline too, local peers might be offline for a bit, but the rest of the Internet would just route around that node.
Social engineering, zero day vulnerabilies, inside operatives. Their security runs tight ships but the towers are on the backbone and unmanned. The hardware isn’t all custom. Vulnerabilities happen. I wouldn’t be shocked if they could. E knocked out by some careful BGP hackery.
Yeah, BGP fuckery takes sites offline far too often. But you don’t need access to a specific site to do that, you just need to be someone that can announce routes.
I am affected by the outage. ATT. My phone tells me i’m not registered when i try to make a call. I cant send SMS. On the outage map, it just shows that it is the cell tower that is causing outage.
I won’t go through how you authenticate into a mobile network, but when you can’t your phone is pretty useless. The local cell doesn’t have a thing to do with it.
Idk. Was just reporting my experience. It came back like exactly 12pm CST.
Fixed then! Long outage.
Most issues reported where most people are? Wild.
If a mobile phone is all you have, and you can’t authenticate to the network, you won’t have a way to make a report.