AT&T says massive cell outage caused by technical error, not cyberattack

AT&T said Thursday that a nationwide cellphone outage that affected more than 1.7 million customers and disrupted 911 services in several states was caused by an error made while it was expanding its network — not by a cyberattack.

Spokesman Jim Greer said AT&T would continue to assess the outage, which began spiking early Thursday and quickly grew to tens of thousands of reports on Downdetector, peaking shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern time and gradually decreasing for the rest of the morning. He said AT&T restored service to all customers by about 3 p.m.