After an outage affected AT&T customers across the country this morning and afternoon, the telecommunications company says its wireless network is back online. Officials are trying to find a cause behind the outage. However, throughout the day, rumors circulated regarding solar flares that occurred right before the outage was the culprit.

Did this phenomenon cause it? Straight off the bat, it’s unlikely that the solar flares caused the outage.

Summarizing the Solar Flares

First, what is a solar flare? According to NASA, it’s an intense burst of radiation associated with sunspots that releases magnetic energy out into space. These giant explosions from the sun send energy, light and particles throughout the solar system. Flares can last several minutes to several hours.

Sometimes this burst of energy can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth. This was not the case this go-around.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center recorded two solar flares over the last day and a half. The first occurred late Wednesday, February 21 and the second very early on Thursday, February 22. In Central Indiana time, the second flare occurred just after 1:30 a.m. Thursday. The SWPC rates these types of flares on a scale of 1-5. These occurred in the High Frequency, which is the range where radiowaves live. These flares mainly interfered with radio communication systems.

The scale is as follows:

  • R1:  Minor
  • R2:  Moderate
  • R3:  Strong (wide area blackout of HF radio communication, loss of radio contact for about an hour, low-frequency navigation signals degraded for about an hour)
  • R4:  Severe
  • R5:  Extreme

These two flares were both rated R3 which is right in the middle of the scale. The second flare that occurred in the overnight hours Thursday would not have been felt around this side of the Earth. That’s why the “daylight” or “sunlit” side of the earth was affected by the blackout.

Because it was nighttime in the United States, this solar flare did not impact us. Plus, cell phones use an entirely different frequency called the Ultra High frequency (UHF). So cell phones/data likely would not have been impacted even if the flare hit closer to the United States.

Not to mention that the timing was also inaccurate. The first reports of the outage didn’t start coming in until several hours after the last solar flare occurred.

These types of flares overall can affect communication systems, radar and the Global Positioning System (GPS) but it’s unlikely these caused the AT&T outage. Things like this serve as a good reminder that if cell service goes down, there are ways to get weather alerts. This is very important to remember, especially during times of severe weather.