After days of speculation and mounting customer frustration, Wisconsin wireless provider Cellcom has officially acknowledged that a cyberattack is behind the widespread service outage and disruptions that have plagued its network since the evening of May 14th.
The incident severely impacted voice and SMS services for subscribers across Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, leaving countless customers unable to make calls or send text messages.
Initially attributing the disruption to a “technical issue,” Cellcom CEO Brighid Riordan released a letter and a video message, acknowledging the true nature of the prolonged outage.
“We experienced a cyber incident. While this is unfortunate, it’s not something we were unprepared for,” stated Riordan in her communication [pdf].
“We have protocols and plans in place for exactly this kind of situation. From the start, we’ve followed those plans – including engaging outside cybersecurity experts, notifying the FBI and Wisconsin officials, and working around the clock to bring systems safely back online.”
The company said the attack was concentrated on a segment of their network separate from sensitive customer data.
“The incident was concentrated on an area of our network separate from where we store sensitive information related to you, our Cellcom/Nsight family,” Riordan assured subscribers.
“We have no evidence that personal information related to you, your name, your addresses, your financial information, is impacted by this event.”
Despite Cellcom’s initial assurances that data services, iMessage, RCS messaging, and 911 emergency services remained operational, users reported significant difficulties, including the inability to port their numbers to other carriers due to Cellcom’s platform issues. This led to increasing frustration among the affected customer base.
On May 19th, Cellcom began to gradually restore some services, including SMS text messaging and the ability to make and receive phone calls between Cellcom subscribers. However, a full restoration remains elusive.
“While we would like to provide a timeline for full restoration, we are unable to share exact milestones with complete confidence,” reads a service updates page on Cellcom’s site.
“Our team continues to build on the progress shared yesterday and our best estimate is that full service will be restored by or before the end of this week.”
For Cellcom subscribers still experiencing issues, the company recommends enabling airplane mode for 10 seconds and then disabling it again.
If this fails, users are advised to power down and restart their phones to attempt to re-initiate services.
CEO Brighid Riordan’s video message further aimed to explain the situation and the ongoing recovery efforts to subscribers. The coming days will be critical as Cellcom races against the clock to fulfill its promise of full service restoration by the weekend.
