Whereas Thursday’s AT&T outage grabbed nationwide headlines, outages do occur and normally for mundane causes, a number of telecom consultants informed CNN.
Widespread causes embody construction-related digging that punctures fiber optic cables and software program misconfigurations that may result in interruptions, stated TJ Kennedy, a public security communications knowledgeable.
“I am unable to consider each incident in the previous few years, however I can consider issues associated to routers, issues associated to backhaul, issues associated to software program,” Kennedy stated. “This has occurred throughout all main carriers, a number of instances prior to now few years alone.”
Thursday’s outage might have been attributable to human errors in AT&T’s cloud-based networking system, stated Lee McKnight, an affiliate professor on the Syracuse College College of Info Research.
“The soiled secret of telecom networks today is they’re only a bunch of wires and towers related to the cloud,” McKnight stated. “Somebody making a mistake, and others on their workforce — and their automated instruments — not catching it, is sort of widespread in cloud computing.”