FCC Conducting ‘Thorough’ Investigation Into AT&T Outage

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it’s conducting a “thorough” investigation of the February 22 wireless network outage at AT&T Inc. that interrupted mobile service for hundreds of thousands of subscribers in cities around the US. The agency has requested “more in-depth information from AT&T concerning the cause, effect, and the company’s response to the incident.” The FCC had previously said it was looking into the issue. “The industry routinely cooperates with our key regulators in the aftermath of serious outages to evaluate how network resiliency and reliability can be improved,” AT&T said in a statement. AT&T noted it was “already working with the FCC on its review.” AT&T has blamed the outage on what it called “an incorrect process” while expanding its network, which serves about 87 million subscribers. The incident began before dawn and AT&T didn’t announce the network’s restoration until mid-afternoon. Customers filed more than 1.5 million outage reports on service-tracking website Downdetector.