NY Officials Urging Those Impacted By AT&T Outage To File Complaints

NEW YORK — New York's attorney general is investigating the massive cell service outage on the AT&T network that affected customers in New York and nationwide last week, according to a news release shared Thursday.

Attorney General Letitia James is looking into the cause of, and AT&T's response to, the widespread outage Feb. 22, which left tens of thousands of customers unable to place calls, send text messages, or access the internet for up to 12 hours, officials said.

As a result, many "were unable to contact loved ones, conduct business, or access emergency services," officials noted, adding that they encourage "all affected New Yorkers to file complaints" with the attorney general's office.

"Americans rely on cell service providers for consistent and reliable service to help them with nearly every aspect of their daily lives," James wrote. "Nationwide outages are not just an inconvenience, they can be dangerous, and it's critical that we protect consumers when an outage occurs."

The outage began at around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Feb. 22, and AT&T had more than 73,000 outages as of 9:30 a.m. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country’s largest.

The most reported outage locations were in Houston, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, New York City, and Austin.

"No matter the timing, one thing is clear — we let down many of our customers, including many of you and your families," CEO John Stankey said in a letter to employees published Sunday on the company’s website. "For that, we apologize."

AT&T customers whose service was interrupted during the outage will receive a $5 credit, according to the company.

Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported massive outages Thursday morning, though not as severe, according to DownDetector.

In a statement shared with Patch last week, Lee McKnight —an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University and an affiliate of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism — theorized that the most likely cause of the outages is "a cloud misconfiguration, which is a fancy word for saying human error."

McKnight continued: "A possible but far less likely outcome is an intentional malicious hack of ATT's network, but the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental."