Major Cell System Failures, 2024 Edition

On 22 February 2024, AT&T users across the nation experienced failed cellular service, reportedly including FirstNet users. This episode is just one more incident in a steady beat of major national system failures around the globe. These failures include:

• 2024: AT&T (Feb), Three UK (Feb)
• 2023: Optus (Nov)
• 2022: Rogers (Jul), KDDI (Jul)
• 2021: Rogers (Apr)

In the case of the last Rogers failure, we understand that configuration changes for the BGP routing mechanism triggered the outage. While AT&T provides thin insight into the root cause for the outage, statements suggest a similar change process issue. Hopefully, the FCC and the FirstNet Authority will conduct an after-incident review that fully discloses the root cause and plans to prevent future failures.

The age-old lesson for emergency service agencies remains clear: Anticipate failure and ensure a PACE plan is in place. But perhaps this also means we should be careful about swapping reliable narrowband legacy Land Mobile Radio (LMR) networks for cellular-only single-service provider connectivity. Having a parallel analog/TETRA/P25 LMR voice-centric network helps avoid a total operational blackout.

The failure comes at an inopportune time for AT&T. They are pushing hard to have the FCC shift the 4.9 GHz public safety spectrum from local agency control to FirstNet's AT&T spectrum tranche. The opposition's argument for diverse spectrum approaches just got a boost.

NBC News Report link