AT&T Mobility's widespread network outage in February that disrupted 125 million devices and blocked over 92 million voice calls, over 25,000 of which were for 911, over a 12-hour period was noted by the Federal Communications Commission not to have only stemmed from a network misconfiguration by an employee but also from inadequate best practices adherence, SC Media reports.
Aside from lacking compliance with internal procedures, AT&T did not have any peer review or sufficient lab and post-installation testing measures while having deficient controls to avert the outage, the FCC report showed.
Such an outage was also prolonged by system issues that persisted even after the remediation of the configuration error, according to the report.
Outages have been noted by cybersecurity experts to be an emerging cybersecurity threat following the widespread global disruption brought upon by a faulty CrowdStrike Falcon update last week.
"The trend reflects broader concerns about infrastructure resilience in the face of increasing technical complexity and external threats. Efforts to improve redundancy, cybersecurity and regulatory oversight are critical to addressing these vulnerabilities," said Entro Security co-founder and CEO Itzik Alvas.
