AT&T provides some details about March 5 FirstNet data-service outage

A “software issue” in a Georgia data center caused the March 5 service outage that impacted some FirstNet subscribers in the southeast U.S. region, according to a statement from AT&T, the contractor charged with building and maintaining the FirstNet nationwide public-safety broadband network (NPSBN).

“Our root-cause analysis confirmed a software issue prevented some data traffic from processing correctly,” according to an AT&T spokesman’s prepared statement that was provided today to IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “This occurred after intentionally moving traffic off the primary to a back-up router as part of a planned capacity upgrade in our Georgia data center.

“Although a majority of data was handled normally throughout, the software issue affected some voice and data features for some enterprise and FirstNet customers in the southeast region. Technicians quickly responded and the issue was resolved early morning.

“We’re taking actions to help prevent this from occurring in the future, including revising internal processes. We take our commitment to FirstNet subscribers and the mission seriously and apologize for any disruption this event caused.”

Today’s statement marks the first comments from AT&T about the incident since the data-service outage occurred on March 5. Initial comments from AT&T stated that “voice service was not impacted,” but today’s statement indicates that “some voice and data features” were impacted.

AT&T did not respond to questions from IWCE’s Urgent Communications seeking clarification about the scope of the March 5 service outage in time to be included in his article.

Industry sources said that they received reports that the March 5 outage impacted users in at least two states for multiple hours, but IWCE’s Urgent Communications was not able to confirm these reports by speaking with affected FirstNet users.