The country’s biggest wireless carriers have shied away from pointing fingers at one another after a rare five-hour outage on Tuesday left much of the Southeast with spotty or no cellphone coverage for much of the day.
The massive outage was rare, not just because of the geographic scope of the outage, which affected customers across Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Kentucky, but also because it affected all major wireless carriers.
For most consumers, getting answers about the root cause of the problem has not been aided by the terse explanations offered by the major carriers. But a few experts have pieced together enough evidence to conclude that AT&T’s wired network was the culprit.
Verizon said the problem was caused by a “vendor,” without being specific.
U.S. Cellular also blamed a “third-party vendor.”