AT&T Outage Takes Down Other Carriers [telecom]

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An AT&T problem allegedly caused outage on Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile

A "dirty little secret," carriers often have just one backhaul provider

by Jon Brodkin

The four major wireless carriers in the US had an outage lasting about five hours in several states last night, and a report from Re/code says it was all caused by a hardware problem in AT&T's network.

Although AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile US, and Sprint each operate their own cell towers, in the states where the outage occurred they apparently all acquire backhaul from AT&T's network. Re/code reported that "several telecommunications industry sources" confirmed that AT&T's network caused the outage for all four carriers in parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and Indiana. (Another report said Georgia was affected as well.)