AT&T Says Technical Issues Led to Thursday’s Cell Network Outage

February 23rd, 9:59 AM EST

By NEWSnet Digital Team

AT&T wireless service illustration

AT&T

AT&T said an hours-long outage to its U.S. cellphone network Thursday appeared to be the result of a technical error, and was not a malicious attack.

The outage knocked out cellphone service for thousands of its users across the U.S.; many were without service for hours.

[Earlier Report: Widespread Problems Reported With Wireless Services Early Thursday]

AT&T blamed the incident on an error in coding, without elaborating.

“Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack,” the Dallas-based company said late Thursday.

Outage tracker DownDetector noted that outages, which began at about 3:30 a.m. ET, peaked at around 73,000 reported incidents. AT&T had more than 58,000 outages around noon ET, in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The carrier is the country’s largest, with more than 240 million subscribers.

By 9 p.m. ET, the reports on AT&T’s network were fewer than 1,000.

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