A widespread network outage was reported in the United States on Thursday morning, February 22, 2024, following two major eruptions on the Sun, an X1.8 flare at 23:07 UTC on February 21 and X1.7 at 06:32 UTC on February 22. Both erupted from Active Region 3590.
The main question everyone in the space weather community was confronted with today is whether these flares could have affected the telecommunication networks in the United States, causing major outages.
These outages primarily affected cellular service, particularly for users of AT&T, with tens of thousands of their users reporting issues according to Downdetector.com. Other carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, UScellular, and Cricket Wireless were also affected to a lesser extent.
The outages also affected companies like Starlink, Consumer Cellular, Boost Mobile, Google, US Cellular, Spectrum, Xfinity, OpenAI, Facebook, Microsoft and many others.
The impact was felt in major cities across the US, including San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, causing disruptions to communication, internet access, and even emergency services in some areas. Most carriers reported full or partial restoration of service later in the day.
Nothing that I’ve heard of in the UK or Europe. Outside the comments about US outages I did see one suggestion of outages in South-East Asia and Australia, but the reporting was very non-specific, i.e. not mentioning any services or companies affected.
I did see a space weather expert comment that the flares weren’t relevant to AT&T outage so I’m wondering whether some companies are using the flares as a good excuse to cover unrelated outages? “It wasn’t our fault, the sun did it!”
Turns out, the AT&T outage had nothing to do with the solar flares - AT&T admitted it was a software update that caused the outage. And it only affected certain geographic areas in the US and only AT&T. The other US carriers stated that their “outages” were reported by people trying to call AT&T customers. Here’s a news release from the Space Weather Prediction Center:
If the solar flares did impact the mobile networks, it would’ve impacted all carriers.
That’s what i was going to say. Add to that, later in the day, there was an X6.3 from that same region with no ill effects on the cell system. HF radio went totally dead for 20-25 minutes after the X6.3, but that’s to be expected.