Four states—Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas—experienced major 911 outages on Wednesday that prevented residents from contacting emergency services and first responders for several hours.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating the outages, according to NBC News. The outlet reported that there is currently “no indication” that the incident was caused by a cyberattack or “malicious act,” and it is more likely that the outage was related to Lumen Technologies, a telecommunications company.
The company, however, has placed blame on a third party that reportedly cut a fiber while installing a light pole.
“On April 17, some customers in Nevada, South Dakota and Nebraska experienced an outage due to a third-party company installing a light pole – unrelated to our services,” Mark Molzen, Lumen Global Issues Director, told CNN on Thursday.
Molzen noted that Lumen does not provide 911 services in Texas, and said that the company, “restored all services in approximately two and a half hours.”
This incident comes on the heels of a major AT&T outage that left customers primarily on the East Coast without service for several hours, though some customers were affected in Los Angeles and Houston. The carrier said that the outage was likely the result of a process error, not a cyber attack. However, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently urged caution, noting that China has placed itself in a position to potentially attack critical infrastructure in the U.S.
While speaking at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Wray said, “[China’s] plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist.”
“The fact is, the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he added. “It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing.”
This piece first appeared at TPUSA.
Image from Canva.
