N.Y. AG James, FirstNet Launch AT&T Outage Probes
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) will investigate AT&T's nationwide wireless outage last week, the AG office said Thursday. The office will investigate its causes and AT&T’s response, and wants consumers to file complaints, it said. “Nationwide outages are…
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not just an inconvenience, they can be dangerous,” James said. AT&T CEO John Stankey on Sunday apologized for the outage, which the carrier blamed on a technical issue (see 2402260031). AT&T declined to comment Thursday. In addition, the FirstNet Authority is probing the AT&T outage (see 2402220058), and the authority board will discuss what happened at its quarterly meeting Wednesday, authority CEO Joe Wassel wrote in a Thursday blog post. The FirstNet network was restored by around 5 a.m. CST, about three hours after service was initially affected for some users, he said. “We are committed to identifying the circumstances that led to the outage and working with AT&T to implement strategies and corrective actions to help prevent FirstNet from experiencing an outage like this in the future,” he said. “Resilience is crucial in the face of adversity, and AT&T stepped up and prioritized the restoration of FirstNet.” Wessel said he has also established a FirstNet Authority After-Action Task Force “comprised of public safety, technical, and emergency management experts from our team” that will “help us strengthen our preparedness and emergency communications processes” to prepare for future outages.