Speculation Rises After Outages at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile

(DailyDig.com) – On February 22, over 70 thousand customers of AT&T’s network lost access to their internet for nearly eleven hours, which left them unable to connect to any website, make phone calls, or text.

Initially, speculations pointed to a solar flare as the cause of the outage, where a large release of energy from the sun reached Earth and could disrupt electrical services. However, a solar physicist, Dr. Ryan French from the National Solar Observatory, said that only flares affect Earth when they occur from the side of the sun facing our planet.

Depending on the size of the flare, if it does hit Earth, it may only affect the side of the planet facing the sun at the time of impact. According to AT&T, the outage began about eleven hours prior to their restoration of service at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. This would have caused the outage to begin prior to dawn, before the US was facing the sun.

AT&T announced that their outage resulted from what they stated was a glitch within their company. They assured their customers that there was no evidence of an attack or tampering with their system.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a statement saying that they were investigating the incident but didn’t have any information regarding the cause of the outage. The White House stated that AT&T is working with federal agencies, including the FCC, to investigate the matter further.

Other providers of internet service, such as T-Mobile and Verizon, received some reports of outages. They both reported that their services were functioning normally. A Verizon representative told the news media that it was possible that their customers were encountering issues while trying to call or text customers of AT&T while they were experiencing their outage.

After restoring their service, AT&T reported on their website that an internal application caused the outage due to incorrect processing execution. At that time, they were working on expanding their network, and the glitch was not an intentional attack.