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What caused Verizon outage? Expert finds timing ‘suspicious’ amid US-Iran tensions
An official probe into the massive Verizon outage has begun even as an expert has flagged the ‘suspicious’ timing, given tensions with China and Iran.
Verizon's massive network outage on Wednesday left many of its users disgruntled, even as the company rushed to make amends. Verizon's services were down for hours before being restored, and now an official probe has begun to determine what led to this outage.
However, many on social media speculated that the outage, which led to phones going into SOS mode, was caused by a cyberattack. New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan even called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open a probe into the outage.
While no signs of hacking or cybercriminals have been found so far, here's what officials have said about the likely cause of the outage.
What caused the Verizon outage?
As per officials, a network server in New Jersey went down, likely triggering the day-long outage, as per an initial investigation. Law enforcement agencies on the east coast are reportedly searching for signs of sabotage.
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Verizon itself has not commented on what caused the massive outage. The company instead offered a $20 credit to their account, to make up for the troubles.
Expert finds outage timing ‘suspicious’
While nothing points to foul play yet, James Knight of DigitalWarfare.com said cyberwarfare experts are suspicious of this outage being able to spread across the US within minutes.
“True single-point failures shouldn't cascade this way in a properly engineered system, and the silence on exact causes only heightens doubts,” he explained to Daily Mail. As per Knight, Verizon has ‘built in redundancies’ like spread out data centers, constant system tests, and numerous routing paths for signals, all of which should have worked towards preventing the kind of widespread service blackout that just occurred.
“That said, there are no credible signs or evidence this was cyberwarfare, a cyberattack, or foreign interference,” he further noted. Knight, however, went on to build on the ‘suspicious’ timing, given geopolitical tensions betweenthe US and adversaries like China and Iran. At the time of the Verizon outage, there was a lot of speculation of whether the US would strike Iran amid ongoing protests against their Supreme Leader Khamenei. President Donald Trump, however, did not launch any attack, saying that he had it on ‘good authority’ that killing of protesters had stopped there.
Knight meanwhile added, “Everyone I've spoken to is either tight-lipped or suspicious.” However, the expert noted that in such cases groups usually claim responsibility to gain visibility for a major hack, but nobody has come forward yet in this case.
