Many AT&T customers could not call or text yesterday

If you didn’t read yesterday’s newsletter because you were one of the tens of thousands of AT&T customers without internet access, we’ll give you a pass (just this once).

Starting around 4am ET on Thursday, customers began reporting widespread internet and cell service outages, according to Downdetector.com. Then, around 8am ET, the outages peaked at 74,000+ reports, with most issues thronged in cities like Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. AT&T said that by late morning, 75% of its network was back up and running, and that the issue was resolved by late Thursday afternoon.

Emergency services: First responders said some customers couldn’t get through to 911 operators and urged them to use the ancient device known as a landline instead. The Massachusetts State Police asked people to please stop calling 911 just to check if their service was working, as call centers in the state were inundated with test dials.

What happened? AT&T blamed the outage on a software update gone poorly. Before that, there were, naturally, murmurs online of a possible cyberattack, but experts say these kinds of outages almost always stem from boring, non-Mission Impossible-sounding reasons like construction equipment hitting cables or human errors.