Communications: The Connective Tissue of Every Response

THE LIFELINES SERIES · PART 4 OF 10

The Hook

At 2:42 a.m. Eastern on February 22, 2024, an AT&T Mobility network engineer pushed a configuration change. Three minutes later, the nationwide outage began. By the time service was fully restored, more than twelve hours later, the FCC would find that the event affected more than 125 million devices, blocked more than 92 million voice calls, and prevented more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911. FirstNet — the dedicated public-safety broadband network- went down between 2:45 and 5:00 a.m. AT&T did not formally notify FirstNet customers for three hours.

There was no storm. No attack. No earthquake. A single misconfigured network element in a carrier’s core, in the middle of the night, and across 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, briefly prevented a phone call to a dispatcher. If that does not permanently reframe how emergency managers think about the Communications lifeline, nothing will.