The AT&T outage had it all (Picture: Getty)
Conspiracy theorists had a field day after a major US mobile network fell over and the FBI had to get involved.
Yesterday’s outage hit AT&T, the country’s biggest network and mobile provider, leaving customers unable to make calls, use the internet, or even dial 911. The company’s 5G network covers around 290 million people across the US.
Those who could still get online were quick to share their thoughts about what might have happened, falling into two main camps.
The first argued it was a cyberattack, the second suggested a pair of enormous solar flares had struck.
Many on X, formerly Twitter, were quick to point the finger at China or Russia.
User Mike Mike, whose profile picture is of Pepe the Frog in a cowboy hat, wrote: ‘China Hack AT&T to see how we would react in real time…. and collect data.’
Another X user, @DanielvsBabylon, wrote: ‘Last week: a significant space threat from russia [sic].
‘This week: “the sun” knocks out only At&t and only in the states.
‘Hmm.’
Lee McKnight, associate professor at Syracuse University in New York, said the outage did have some telltale signs of being a cyberattack.
Speaking to Mail Online, he said the widespread nature of the issue suggested it could be a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, where websites or online services are flooded with requests at the same time, overloading the servers.
Others blamed Mother Nature however.
One of this week’s enormous X-class flares (Picture: NASA SDO)
On Wednesday night and Thursday morning, two X-class solar flares erupted from the Sun. Solar flares are bursts of electromagnetic radiation released when huge arcs of plasma on the Sun’s surface snap.
These are often accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), huge bubbles of charged plasma.
Both can cause communications blackouts on Earth, and have done before.
However, solar flares take just eight minutes to arrive – they travel at the speed of light – while CMEs take days, meaning the maths for yesterday’s outage doesn’t quite add up.
But more of a giveaway is the fact it is unlikely the Sun was able to target just AT&T, and not Verizon, or any other network providers in the US (or in any other countries).
Sadly for those hoping for a wild explanation to the outage, AT&T dashed hopes with a much more mundane reason.
Apparently (so Big Telephone says), it was caused by ‘the application and execution of an incorrect process’. Which is exactly what they would say.
AT&T apologised to customers for the outage.
But not to the Sun for false accusations.