Some AT&T customers experienced a disruption in their wireless service earlier this week, which made it difficult for them to call 911 in an emergency.
It was rectified in a few hours, with the company blaming a software fault, but it's only one of many issues the wireless provider has experienced in recent months, including outages and data breaches that have disrupted operations and left users in the dark.
Earlier this year in February, its network went down for 11 hours, preventing several of its clients in the United States from making calls, texting, or using the internet. AT&T stated that an initial investigation of the outage revealed that it might have been caused by an internal error rather than a cyberattack.
A few weeks later, in March, a data dump containing private information for 73 million current and past customers was exposed onto the "dark web," raising security concerns. According to the company, the data was from 2019 or earlier and did not appear to include financial information or call history specifics.
"It is unclear whether the data originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company stated at the time.
Then, in June, another AT&T outage prevented some consumers from making phone calls between carriers. The issue was resolved within a few hours, but the firm did not disclose what triggered it.
Notably, this week's outage occurred just hours after the Federal Communications Commission announced a $950,000 settlement with AT&T to resolve an investigation into whether the company violated FCC rules by failing to deliver 911 calls and promptly notifying 911 call centres during a previous outage in August 2023.
AT&T’s overflow
Why does this keep occurring to AT&T? CNN spoke with a telecommunications expert who believes there are three main factors at play: software updates gone awry, numerous technological challenges, and congested networks in big cities.
An outage map from Tuesday shows interruptions in New York, Charlotte, North Carolina, Houston, and Chicago. Alex Besen, founder and CEO of Besen Group, which analyses mobile phone carriers, believes it was a network overload issue.
“To avoid any future outages, AT&T needs to increase the number of cell towers, implement advanced load-balancing techniques, use network optimization tools to manage traffic more effectively and prioritize services that can reduce congestion,” Besen stated.