What Experts Have to Say About the AT&T Outage  

A massive outage hit mobile service providers which resulted in cellular services going offline for several hours. The eleven-hour outage had American’s wondering what caused it. 

American cellphone providers such as AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile reported their disrupted services, but offered no explanation. While American citizens and the world waited for answers, experts shared with DailyMail.com the possibility behind what had happened.  

A suggestion made by experts suggested that one of the reasons could be a human error, an intentional hack, or a solar flare, even though they stated that this could be the least possible scenario. 

Thoughts  

According to Lee McKnight, associate Professor in the iSchool, in New York stated ‘The dirty secret of telecom networks these days is they are just a bunch of wires and towers connected to the cloud like everything else in modern life, whether Netflix or your grocery store. With little information released on the cause of AT&T’s cross-country outages, the most likely cause is a cloud misconfiguration. Which is a fancy word for saying human error. I was reviewing this exact issue in class yesterday.’ 

There are reasons could be why the outage took place. For example, cloud misconfigurations or even errors in the security settings which are usually neglected. Interceptions made by servers in Nigeria, China, and Russia to data that belongs to users worldwide was made, even those that run important state-owned telecom providers. It is still an unknown fact, if hackers took advantage of the outage that occurred on Thursday.  

However, a possible reason for the type of outage that took place could have been a misconfiguration. ‘A possible but far less likely outcome is an intentional malicious hack of AT&T’s network, but the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental,’ stated McKnight. 

AT&T and What’s Going On 

In the past year AT&T has suffered data breaches with the last one, in March, affecting nine million people. Another time AT&T fell victim to a natural solar flare was in 1972 which destroyed landline services.  

As one can tell AT&T has been through ups and downs like any server with technical issues, the real question is, what triggered the outage on Thursday? 

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