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Comment by nu11ptr | Hacker News Reader

Using myATT app doesn't even show my wireless account anymore. My entire family account doesn't even show up as a service. Seems like a hack or internal issue that deleted accounts? Can others confirm whether they see their accounts?

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Many of their APIs appear to be intermittently returning 502s, leading to strange behavior in their web/mobile apps.

That's just people trying to figure out if their service has been disconnected rather than it being a network outage

From what I read just a bit ago, basically there is a problem with the database of SIM numbers. So, SIMs all just dislodged from the network because they lost their network authorization. That would lead one to believe it was a botched software push. I imagine online accounts get this information somehow which could explain the portal being broken. I have a prepaid hotspot and it works fine, but none of the "family plan" month to month contract phones work. I also wonder if there's a physical SIM vs eSIM situation that could explain "newer" models working.

In our house this morning, the two phones with physical SIMs worked fine and the two phones with eSIMs were SOS mode only.

I could log into my AT&T account just fine and all phones showed up correctly.

(I’m submitting this from an AT&T 5G connection, no WiFi nearby)

aligns with my experience too. My wife's newer phone was sos but my older one was fine. Both ATT.

That would be consistent with the symptoms. Big telco networks are hierarchical with most functions pushed to regional data centers with a very small number of services in a redundant pair or trio of central data centers. Subscriber database (HSS, UDR) would be one such function.

The cause of a failure of the HSS could be manifold, ranging from router failures to software bugs to cyber attack (databases of 100M+ users being a juicy target).

One slightly scary observation from NANOG was that FirstNet, the network that ATT built for first responders, was down. That would be ugly if true and I'd expect the FCC to be very interested in getting to the bottom of it.

Their outage status page is also completely broken. Doesn't show anything.

I can see my account. The first thing I did when I saw my phone wasn't working was log in and pay my bill, thinking maybe I had missed one or something.

The account management / status tools were slow and flaky on the best days. I wouldn’t rule out a little extra traffic knocking them out. Correlation is not necessarily causation.

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