FirstNet Authority vows to ‘continue to hold AT&T accountable’ in aftermath of outage

FirstNet Authority officials provided some additional insight into the circumstances surrounding the Feb. 22 outage suffered by contractor AT&T—although no new information about the cause—and proclaimed that the carrier giant would be held “accountable.”

Renee Gordon, vice chair of the FirstNet Authority board, outlined the FirstNet Authority’s response to the AT&T outage and noted that the carrier is expected to provide an after-action report about the incident.

“The FirstNet Authority provided information as soon as it was available to our Public Safety Advisory Committee and our stakeholder community,” Gordon said during last week’s FirstNet Authority board meeting, which was webcast. “We requested AT&T submit an official after-action report, per our contract, to assess the root cause of the outage.

“We understand the importance of this and will continue to hold AT&T accountable for delivering the network public safety requires and relies on for their life-saving missions.”

There was little new information regarding the cause of the problem. Richard Carrizzo, chair of the FirstNet Authority board, emphasized that issue was not the result of a cyberattack but reiterated previous statements attributing the outage to “an incorrect process” executed while AT&T expanded its network. Carrizzo also said that service was restored to all FirstNet users—public-safety users were prioritized in the restoration process, Gordon noted—by 5 a.m. Central on Feb. 22, meaning the outage lasted about two-and-half hours for affected FirstNet subscribers.

FirstNet Authority Executive Director and CEO Joe Wassel described the outage as “a powerful reminder—an important reminder—that there’s always more to be done to build out the most reliable and resilient network for public safety.”

Wassel outlined some of the actions the FirstNet Authority will take to make this reliability vision a reality.

“We will take this head on,” Wassel said during the board meeting. “In the coming days and weeks and months, we will work very closely with our great partner at AT&T to identify the circumstances, the cause and implement strategies for corrective actions to prevent an outage like this in the future.”

Wassel noted that “in the world of telecom, outages are unavoidable” and described the creation of a new task force that is expected to establish best practices to be followed to avoid outages and reduce their impact when they happen.

“Within the FirstNet Authority, we have stood up an after-action task force, made up of public-safety technical and emergency-management experts from across the organization,” Wassel said. “The task force will gather information about the event and provide recommendations for us to take action.

“The task force also will help us strengthen our preparedness [and] emergency-communications process, so that—in the event of a future outage—we can understand the impact faster, we can surge to remedy the issue with AT&T, and rapidly share joint operational situational awareness with the public-safety community.”