FCC Conducting ‘Thorough’ Investigation Into AT&T Outage
(Bloomberg) -- The Federal Communications Commission said it’s conducting a “thorough” investigation of the Feb. 22 wireless network outage at AT&T Inc. that interrupted mobile service for hundreds of thousands of subscribers in cities around the US.
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The agency has requested “more in-depth information from AT&T concerning the cause, effect, and the company’s response to the incident,” a spokesperson for the agency said in an email Thursday. The FCC had previously said it was looking into the issue.
“The industry routinely cooperates with our key regulators in the aftermath of serious outages to evaluate how network resiliency and reliability can be improved,” AT&T said in a statement. AT&T noted it was “already working with the FCC on its review.”
AT&T has blamed the outage on what it called “an incorrect process” while expanding its network, which serves about 87 million subscribers. The incident began before dawn and AT&T didn’t announce the network’s restoration until mid-afternoon. Customers filed more than 1.5 million outage reports on service-tracking website Downdetector.
The outage cut communications for workers in cities including New York, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago and Dallas. The service disruption upended communications with emergency responders and officials took to social media urging AT&T customers to use landlines to call 911 for emergencies.
AT&T apologized for the outage and announced that customers will get a $5 credit on their wireless accounts, the average cost of a full day of service.
New York Attorney General Letitia James launched an investigation into the incident last week.
The FCC extracted a $19.5 million settlement from T-Mobile US Inc. in 2021 following a 12-hour outage in the previous year blamed on equipment failure. The problem was magnified by a software flaw in T-Mobile’s network that had been latent for months, the agency said.
The incident led to congestion across T-Mobile networks and caused the failure of more than 23,000 calls to 911 emergency centers, the FCC said.
The Washington Post reported earlier on the formal FCC probe of AT&T’s recent outage.
AT&T is the third-largest US retail wireless carrier, behind Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
(Updates with AT&T comment in third paragraph; adds background in ninth paragraph.)
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