Charlotte tech company helped customers impacted by the AT&T outage
CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — At its peak, the country’s largest wireless provider had 73,000 reported outages to start Thursday morning.
AT&T stated it was having issues with its wireless service resulting in an hours-long interruption for its customers.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers,” the company said.
“It’s rather busy,” said Jeff Sagraves with Blue Line Technologies in Charlotte. “More verification of, ‘This isn’t working. Why? What do I do about it?’”
AT&T, other cellular providers see significant outages
Over at Blue Line Technologies, employees were fielding questions from customers. Some were unable to work altogether with their computer login reliant on a text-based multi-factor authentication.
“One, we recommend that people don’t use text multi-factor authentication,” Sagraves said, “So we have to go in and set up application-based MFA.”
The outages began around 3:30 in the morning. While AT&T hasn’t yet released the cause for the disruption, Jeff Sagraves says the possibilities are wide-ranging.
“We have no idea,” he said. “We don’t know, however, the symptoms could be a distributed denial of service attack or DDOS, which is a possibility,” he continued. “It’s where a foreign actor is sending constant pings at a device somewhere so that it can’t send out messages and it’s stopping service. Alternatively, it could be something as simple as a software update on a piece of equipment just failed.”
What is SOS mode? What to do when you lose phone service
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police revealed some people were unable to contact 911, but added the call center itself wasn’t having issues receiving calls. Sagraves says now is a good time for companies and customers to upgrade security and figure out a backup plan in the event something like this happens again.
“What are you going to do if it’s something bigger?” he questioned. “So, this is a great little exercise to figure out if your cellular service is down today, what happens if your internet is down for your office? Do you just send everybody home? Or do you have a backup plan? Same with your cellular service.”
Just after 3 p.m. Thursday, AT&T posted an update, stating service had been restored.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”
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