(WWJ) A cellular outage that impacted thousands of Metro Detroiters on Thursday is over.
Police departments in Michigan and across the U.S. reported having issue with their 9-1-1 system following a nationwide outage by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and other carriers, beginning early Thursday morning. This included Washtenaw, Monroe and Oakland counties.
AT&T had more than 58,000 outages midday, but the company said at around 3:30 p.m. that all customers have been restored.
AT&T did not reveal a possible reason for the outage, saying 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."
David Derigiotis with Embroker, which focuses on cyber security and information privacy, said there could be many reasons for an outage like this.
Although, he said, we can't rule out a cyberattack.
"We don't know exactly what has caused this significant outage," Derigiotis said, speaking live with Tracey McCaskill on WWJ Newsradio 950.
"But I will say, a lot of time when a business, or here we're talking about a large communications service provider, goes down, there could be simple, unintended consequences for changes that are made to the network. It could be upgrades, patches, it could be changes to the infrastructure or software that results in an outages; so we just don't know. A lot of times it is mundane."
Derigiotis said outages like these should remind consumers that they need a backup plan when it comes to communication.
"In the spirit of trying to be as redundant and as protective as possible, I think it's important for all people to have multiple communication channels," he said. "Because if you're relying only on the cellular technology on cell phones, you know, you may be in real trouble if you're not able to access it. So, having instant messaging apps, social media, email, or even WI-FI calling calling like Google Voice, I think those are all important things that people should consider when something like this happens."
Emergency 9-1-1 services should be back up in Metro Detroit, but anyone still having difficulty reaching 9-1-1 should use Wi-Fi calling, or dial the main number for their police department.