Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The FCC’s report on AT&T’s network outage this February reveals that it blocked over 92 million voice calls, including over 25,000 emergency calls to 911.
- The outage was triggered by an error in a network expansion update, but the FCC notes it was the result of several issues in AT&T’s internal processes.
- The FCC Enforcement Bureau is now investigating the findings for potential violations of FCC rules.
The FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has published a report highlighting the cause and extent of the AT&T network outage that impacted all of the carrier’s wireless customers in February this year. The nationwide outage blocked over 92 million phone calls, including more than 25,000 emergency calls to 911.
FCC’s report states (via ArsTechnica) that the outage occurred shortly after AT&T implemented a network expansion update with an equipment configuration error. The FCC found that the error caused AT&T’s network “to enter ‘protect mode’ to prevent impact to other services, disconnecting all devices from the network, and prompting a loss of voice and 5G data services for all wireless users.”
Although AT&T managed to revert the changes within two hours, it took over 12 hours for the carrier to fully restore service as “AT&T Mobility’s device registration systems were overwhelmed with the high volume of requests for re-registration onto the network.”
The FCC investigation further revealed that even though the network expansion update triggered the outage, several issues in AT&T’s internal processes were the main cause of the outage. The report states:
The Bureau finds that the extensive scope and duration of this outage was the result of several factors, all attributable to AT&T Mobility, including a configuration error, a lack of adherence to AT&T Mobility’s internal procedures, a lack of peer review, a failure to adequately test after installation, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network, a lack of controls to mitigate the effects of the outage once it began, and a variety of system issues that prolonged the outage once the configuration error had been remedied.
The FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau how now referred the matter to the FCC Enforcement Bureau to investigate potential violations of FCC rules. Depending on the Enforcement Bureau’s findings, AT&T could face punitive action.
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