AT&T

Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is hunting for answers about the state of US telecom network security after the Salt Typhoon hack first reported late last year. The attack was so massive that US officials encouraged Americans to use encrypted apps to prevent their conversations from being seen by hackers. Cantwell is asking digital forensics firm Mandiant to hand over assessments behind AT&T and Verizon’s claims that their networks are now secure.

Cameron John Wagenius, aka kiberphant0m, had already pleaded guilty on two charges for hacking T-Mobile and Verizon, and could face 20 years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to additional conspiracy, extortion, and identity theft charges.

AT&T says its acquisition of Lumen, previously known as CenturyLink, will allow it to “significantly expand” its fiber internet service across major cities, like Denver, Las Vegas, Orlando, and others. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026 and includes “substantially all” of Lumen’s fiber-to-home business.

The ability to text an AT&T subscriber from an email address is going away on June 17th, the company has announced.

The FCC investigated AT&T’s “supply chain integrity” after hackers stole customer data from a vendor’s cloud environment in January 2023. “AT&T failed to ensure the vendor: (1) adequately protected the customer information, and (2) returned or destroyed it as required by contract,” the FCC says.

The three-year compliance plan (PDF) and civil penalty aren’t for this April outage or a nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that blocked more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911.

It lasted 12 hours, affected all 50 states, and cut off voice and 5G data for 125 million devices, according to an FCC investigation. The outage caused by a misconfigured network change blocked more than 92 million phones calls, including more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911 emergency services.

Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to AT&T CEO John Stankey with several questions about the cybersecurity attack that resulted in customer data being downloaded from the company’s Snowflake workspace, The Record reports. The senators requested answers by July 29th, and AT&T will respond, according to Reuters.

Last week, an outage disconnected wireless customers trying to use international roaming, and now we know why,