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Countless Americans woke up today with no cellular service, and many are left wondering what caused this to happen. Below, one of our faculty experts offers insights into the situation. If you’d like to schedule an interview with him, please reach out to Vanessa Marquette, media relations specialist, at vrmarque@syr.edu.

is an associate professor in the iSchool at Â鶹ƵµÀUniversity, faculty advisor to the Worldwide Innovation Technology and Entrepreneurship Club (WiTec), and an affiliate of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSTC).ÌýRegarding today’s cellular outage, he writes:

“The dirty secret of telecom networks these days is they are just a bunch of wires & towers connected to the cloud ☁️ like everything else in modern life, whether Netflix or your grocery store.Ìý

With little information released on the cause of ATT’s cross-country outages, the most likely cause is a cloud misconfiguration. Which is a fancy word for saying human error. I was reviewing this exact issue in class yesterday. (IST 615 Cloud Management) which is all too common.Ìý

A possible but far less likely outcome is an intentional malicious hack of ATT’s network, but the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental.”Ìý