The wave of Leave the World Behind jokes that emerged during the nationwide AT&T outage may have been onto something. According to a new report, the widespread outage is being investigated as a potential cyberattack. If true, that would mean the AT&T outage mimicked the Netflix movie starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke far more than anyone realized.
Citing “two sources briefed on the situation,” ABC News reports that “the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies, are now urgently investigating to determine whether the AT&T outages are the result of a cyberattack or a hack, or simply some sort of technical malfunction.”
This afternoon, [National Security Communications Adviser John] Kirby told reporters that DHS and the FBI are looking into the outages as well, and are working with the tech industry and network providers to see what can be done “from a federal perspective to enhance their investigative efforts to figure out what happened here.”
“The bottom line is we don’t have all the answers,” he said. “We’re working very hard to see if we can get to the ground truth of exactly what happened.”
While the implications of the outage being a potential cyberattack are concerning, A&T has informed customers that the situation has been resolved. However, no official explanation for the outage has been disclosed at this time.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,” AT&T said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”
(Via ABC News)
Source: https://uproxx.com/viral/att-outage-cyberattack-investigation-leave-the-world-behind/
