BUFFALO, N.Y. — If your cellphone was not working to make calls early Thursday morning, you were far from alone.
AT&T said all service has since been restored, so the question now is what really happened, and how serious is it when a major piece of our technology goes down without warning?
2 On Your Side spoke to a expert in management sciences about the issue.
To begin with, one Syracuse University expert says the cell phone outage affecting up to 70,000 people across the country, and here in Western New York was a case of "cloud misconfiguration."
Lee McKnight told Associated Press in an email: "A possible but far less likely outcome is an intentional malicious hack of AT&T’s network, but the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental.”
Some interpreted that to perhaps mean human error.
So we also reached out to University at Buffalo School of Management assistant professor Kevin Cleary, who put it this way.
"To me it just kind of feels like, look, sometimes technology breaks. And as much as we don't want to admit it, sometimes things go wrong. This certainly isn't the first time we've had a carrier have an issue like this," Cleary said.
However, maybe not, at this scale. And technically, AT&T, along with the FBI, Homeland Security, and the CISA — the federal cybersecurity agency — are all still investigating the exact cause.
"We're quick to want to point towards a cyberattack, or I've seen some people say, 'Oh, it's a solar flare or something big like that.' And this feels to me like an operational issue where sometimes technology goes wrong," Cleary said.
Cleary, like McKnight, bases that on the hit-and=miss pattern of this outage since some AT&T customers were not impacted.
But he had concerns with news that some 911 centers in San Francisco and Charlotte were impacted. That did not happen in Western New York, and some people could still use an SOS function on the phone for emergency calls
"We rely on our devices for life or death communications," Cleary said. "What impact on human life did this have, that somebody needed to absolutely reach out, and they just simply weren't able to get emergency services."
And again, while discounting a cyberattack, professor Cleary has a sobering thought on cell phone outage impact.
"While I think we will ultimately find that this was just an operational technical issue, it's still kind of gives us a little bit of a taste of, if we had a really bad day, and there was some level of penetration into our national critical infrastructure, this was just a taste of what it would be like. This is just a taste of the chaos that could potentially ensue from something like that," Cleary said.
That is something the FBI has recently been talking about during Congressional hearings warning with a focus on threats posed by China.
Some folks could opt to use Wi-Fi, calling on their cellphones. But Cleary says that may be challenging for someone who is not tech savvy and without the proper apps or experience.