By Angela Buggs
On Thursday, Feb. 22., an AT&T outage hit more than 70,000 customers nationwide. Social media has been in a frenzy since early Thursday, with many frustrated customers stating they were unable to get service, text or call through the AT&T network.
AT&T reports they are working urgently to restore service but have not provided an ETA. Some companies that operate on its network have also reported outages, such as Cricket Wireless reporting more than 13,638 outages around 9 a.m.
By 3 p.m., AT&T had reported that it had fixed the outage and later in the evening posted an update stating: “Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the 0application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.”
Many students were affected by this outage or have friends or family that were affected.
Miradi Mukanga, 17, of Kentwood said, “I found out when I woke up and was on the bus and I was not working.”
During the outage many people were upset that AT&T had not communicated with its customers directly to inform them of the outages.
Mukanga is a dual-enrolled student, and she must contact her parents to let them know where she would be going. She was not able to contact them using her device and had to ask someone to use theirs to get in touch with her parents.
After AT&T was able to restore all services Thursday afternoon, many customers were still upset and questioning how this could even occur. AT&T later sent out a statement apologizing “We have restored wireless service to all our 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.”
