By Aditi Sangal and Catherine Thorbecke, CNN
AT&T said in a statement that it has now resolved the day's massive service outage.
"We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. 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," the company statement said.
From CNN's Sean Lyngaas
A US cyber official tracking the AT&T outage told CNN there has so far been no indication that the outage was caused by malicious cyber activity, but the investigation is ongoing.
From CNN's Catherine Thorbecke
As of approximately 2 pm ET, fewer than 5,000 AT&T customers were still reporting outages, according to self-reported data tracked by DownDetector.
From CNN's Catherine Thorbecke
The Federal Communications Commission confirmed Thursday afternoon that it is investigating the AT&T outage.
“We are aware of the reported wireless outages, and our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is actively investigating,” the FCC said in a statement Thursday afternoon that was posted on X.
“We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers," the agency added.
From CNN’s Kevin Liptak
The White House says federal agencies are in touch with AT&T about network outages Thursday but that it doesn't have all the answers yet on what exactly transpired that led to the interruptions.
National Security spokesman John Kirby said the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were looking into the matter and working with partners in the tech industry to "see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend a hand to their investigative efforts to figure out what happened here."
Kirby said that work was still ongoing.
"The bottom line is we don't have all the answers to that. I mean, this just happened earlier today. And so we're working very hard to see if we can get to the ground truth of exactly what happened," he said.
From CNN's Catherine Thorbecke
As of approximately 12:30 pm ET, some 25,000 AT&T customers were still reporting outages, per data compiled by tracking site DownDetector. (DownDetector, notably, only tracks self-reported outages).
Still, the latest figure is a steep fall from the peak of some 74,000 AT&T customers reporting outages at around 9 am ET.
The DownDetector data indicates the widespread outage began around 4 am ET.
From CNN's Brian Fung
While Thursday's AT&T outage grabbed national headlines, outages do happen and usually for mundane reasons, several telecom experts told CNN.
Common causes include construction-related digging that punctures fiber optic cables and software misconfigurations that can lead to interruptions, said TJ Kennedy, a public safety communications expert.
"I can't think of every incident in the last few years, but I can think of things related to routers, things related to backhaul, things related to software," Kennedy said. "This has happened across all major carriers, multiple times in the past few years alone."
Thursday's outage could have been caused by human errors in AT&T's cloud-based networking system, said Lee McKnight, an associate professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies.
"The dirty secret of telecom networks these days is they are just a bunch of wires and towers connected to the cloud," McKnight said. "Someone making a mistake, and others on their team — and their automated tools — not catching it, is quite common in cloud computing."
From CNN's Brian Fung
The Federal Communications Commission will almost certainly investigate this week's incident, multiple experts said. The FCC requires carriers to report information linked to network disruptions.
"The carriers are required to report their outage numbers over time, and the commission can track the number of consumers and cell sites down and things like that," said a former FCC official.
Telecom carriers have every reason to fix any outages quickly, said the former FCC official, "because it creates black eyes for the brand."
"Everybody's incentives are aligned," the former official said. "The FCC is going to want to know what caused it so that lessons can be learned. And if they find malfeasance or bad actions or, just poor quality of oversight of the network, they have the latitude to act."
From CNN’s Rebekah Riess
Florida Governor and former GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis opened an unrelated press conference on Thursday with comments regarding the ongoing AT&T network outage, affecting thousands of customers.
The governor said his office had been in touch with AT&T, who told them they were working to put customers back online, but were focusing on restoring emergency services. DeSantis said AT&T did not speak about what had caused the outage.
“You think about just your daily life, like having cell phones, honestly, it's like, imagine if we had like an EMP attack or something like that would end up happening this country,” DeSantis said. “It’s not necessarily a good thought, because you think you're just so naturally reliant on having cell service (…) so it's a little bit jarring and think about the implications if something like that happened on much grander scale.”