February 22. There’s another cry in the streets; there are explosions on Main Street; there’s another text message that will never make it to its destination. Have our AI overlords taken over or is it some other nefarious force? No, it’s just an AT&T server outage.

Two weeks ago every area AT&T customer and their mother began panicking over not being able to send texts or do anything on their phones. Turns out that AT&T had been the victim of a nationwide server shutdown.

Multiple theories as to how the surprise tech cleanse happened raged on for a solid few hours due to the FBI’s investigation into the matter.

AT&T eventually said that the outage was a result of a coding error—not a malicious attack. However, AT&T did not explain further as to what the error was in the first place, leading to further unsolved mysteries.

The outage started around 3:30 a.m. and the number of users who went without data peaked at noon with around 73,000 reported cases.

Not even Beaver Area students could escape the outage, making many emotional (and quite confused) for much of the day as their phones displayed “SOS” instead of signal strength.

Clearly not having constant access to social media made some quite angry. Local rabbit farmer and junior Ryan Groff was so upset he could only return a profane gesture when asked to comment on the problem.

It’s okay Ryan, I forgive you; it was a scary day.

Another prominent Beaver resident, senior Titan Kretchmar, seemed to be deeply troubled by the outage. Kretchmar admitted that “Yeah, I was crying.”

Two ECHO staff members were also struck by the outage: seniors Elizabeth Michael and Madeline Boser.

Michael initially suspected that her father had caused the incident since he recently watched Netflix’s Leave the World Behind, a drama about the modern world losing connection to phones altogether.

Michael also reportedly played Geometry Dash in a panicked frenzy to hide her desperation.

Boser and her family on the other hand seemed to have returned to their colonial roots. Michael Boser, Boser’s father, made a point to find Boser at school and tell here face-to-face that the phones were indeed not working. Mr. Boser managed to inform his daughter that her phone was not working . . . long after she and the rest of America were quite aware.

Cricket users experienced similar outages on a smaller scale to their parent company with only 9,000 users having issues. Cricket Wireless is owned by AT&T, meaning that every company owned by the data giant was affected.

AT&T is the nation’s largest data provider and that brings some legitimate worry about potential future outages. Could future outages be direct results of an attack? Could users’ data be stolen? Is AT&T not revealing something to the public?

Other providers seemed not to have been hurt by the February 22 incident. T-Mobile (my data provider) witnessed no unusual problems nationwide nor did Verizon.

If the worst were to happen and your data provider was attacked by rogue hackers, the best thing to do is be prepared.

You can prepare yourself through a plethora of online resources (that you better access before losing your data) or you could just put your faith in the school’s wifi . . .

Let’s hope that no major outage occurs again or we may have to suffer the worst fate in human history: having to take a break from technology.