Over 50,000 AT&T outages were reported at about 7 a.m. ET Thursday, with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to tracking site Downdetector.
AT&T’s network suffered a widespread outages across the country Thursday morning with cellular service and internet down, according to the tracking site Downdetector.
Some Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported outages, though theirs appeared to be less widespread than AT&T.
Over 32,000 AT&T outages were reported by customers at about 4 a.m. ET Thursday. Reports dipped then spiked again to more than 50,000 around 7 a.m., with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to the site.
That number surged to more than 71,000 just before 8 a.m. ET.
A little over 1,100 T-mobile outages and about 3,000 Verizon outages were reported as of 7 a.m. Thursday.
It’s not clear what triggered the service disruption.
You don’t attack wireless in a town you attack the backbone network. NYC was affected as well.
But now that it seems that only AT&t was affected, change control issues are far more likely
Those backbone exchange points are pretty well protected. I walk past the one in Boston pretty frequently. You’d never know it was there by looking at the building. But the actual datacenter is deep inside the building somewhere, probably the basement. Very hard to get to.
Although now that I’m looking at the building on Google maps, it looks like the generators and HVAC are all on the roof? I don’t think I can tell what belongs to the datacenter, but if those do, you could easily take them out with a couple drones.
Of course, they would just fail over to their alternate site in Lowell if anything happened to Boston. And if that site went offline too, local peers might be offline for a bit, but the rest of the Internet would just route around that node.
Social engineering, zero day vulnerabilies, inside operatives. Their security runs tight ships but the towers are on the backbone and unmanned. The hardware isn’t all custom. Vulnerabilities happen. I wouldn’t be shocked if they could. E knocked out by some careful BGP hackery.
Yeah, BGP fuckery takes sites offline far too often. But you don’t need access to a specific site to do that, you just need to be someone that can announce routes.