(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — The service outage that hit tens of thousands of AT&T cell phone customers on Thursday appears to be resolved, but the questions about what led to the outage are just beginning.
Jerry Irvine, CIO of Prescient Solutions in Chicago and a member of the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force, joined the WBBM Noon Business Hour that the cause of the service outage is under investigation.
He said one thing, though, can be ruled out: interference from solar activity.
“Solar activity really would not have affected the internet access or the Wi-Fi access; it’s just not the same type of frequency issues that are occurring,” he said.
At its peak in the late morning, 70,000 AT&T customers reported outages to the website Down Detector.
Irvine added that the outage was so large that it spilled over into other industries.
“You look out at the data on Chase and Wells Fargo … they had substantially more complaints during the same hours of 3 a.m. until now of the same outages of AT&T — not of the same amount, but a higher frequency than they normally do,” said Irvine.
AT&T executives, he said, will have to answer some tough questions about why the outage happened in the first place — and why it took so long to restore service.
“There are a lot of issues that this is going to bring up … and they’re going to have some explaining to do,” he said.