Republican Senator Marco Rubio, Vice Chairman of the U.S. Intelligence Committee, warned on social media that the AT&T network outage affecting tens of thousands of Americans may seem trivial compared to a potential Chinese cyber attack. In a post on "X," he stated, "I don't know the reason for AT&T's outage, but I know it will be 100 times worse when China launches a cyber attack on America on the eve of an invasion of Taiwan, targeting water and banks."
Rubio's warning came as tens of thousands of AT&T customers reported outages affecting their home phones, internet, and mobile phones on Thursday morning, according to Fox News. The outages began surfacing before 3:30 AM Eastern Time, as indicated by a chart on the website tracking outages. Most users, 54%, reported issues with mobile service. More than a third of the affected customers reported having no signal at all, while 8% indicated that their mobile internet was down.
AT&T stated to Fox Business, "Some of our customers are experiencing a wireless service outage this morning. We are urgently working to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored." Over 74,000 AT&T users had reported service interruptions as of 9:30 AM Eastern Time.
U.S. federal agencies have begun investigating the incident, according to ABC News. Earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that cyber attacks by China against the United States and its allies have reached a "peak." He told leaders meeting in Germany, "You may find your companies being harassed and hacked, targeted by a network of proxies for the Chinese Communist Party. You may also find PRC hackers lurking in your private power stations and phone companies and other infrastructure, ready to take it down when they decide you’ve crossed the line too much."
He continued, "Chinese state-sponsored hackers have long been prepared to potentially launch cyber attacks against U.S. oil and natural gas companies as far back as 2011, but nowadays, they have reached a level closer to a fever pitch." He added, "What we are now witnessing is China's increasing construction of offensive weapons within our critical infrastructure, ready to attack when they decide the time is right."
