The 2024 AT&T Outage

On February 22 AT&T had a massive cellular outage. Ookla’s service Downtector said it recorded over 1.8 million reports of customer problems during the outage event, making this the most widespread outage since a big T-Mobile outage in June 2020. The biggest immediate concern is always 911 and emergency services. Many local 911 centers issued an alert about the problem and warned people to use alternate ways to reach 911. But these alerts are largely worthless to somebody connected to AT&T on a smartphone since it’s unlikely they’d get the alert. AT&T said that the outage was due to “the application and execution of an incorrect process” during a network expansion. Basically, human error. This is one of the big drawbacks of a modernized and centralized network. There is always going to be human error.