HOWARD, Wis. (WBAY) – Cellcom confirms it was a cyber incident that knocked out its cellular phone and text services since last Wednesday.
In a YouTube video and a letter to customers, CEO Brighid Riordan says it will take the rest of the week to restore the rest of its services.
Riordan says it had protocols and plans in place in case of a cyber incident. The plan involved notifying the FBI and Wisconsin authorities and consulting cybersecurity experts outside the company. She indicated some partners were brought in from other countries and that teams are “working around the clock to bring systems safely back online.”
Cellcom did not provide any further information about the attack, such as how attackers got into its network.
“The cyber incident that we’re experiencing is segmented to the voice and texting part of your service,” Riordan says in the video. “We live in a world where they are working on how to do damage just as hard as we are working to prevent it. This is the world we live in right now. We have notified authorities, and we have teams working around the clock.”
Riordan says the part of its network targeted by the attack is separate from customer information and there’s no evidence that personal or financial information was affected.
Riordan acknowledged she underestimated how long it would take to restore services.
“While I’ve been closely involved from the very beginning, this is the first time I’m writing to you directly. That wasn’t because I didn’t want to — it was because I truly believed we’d be past this quickly. I stayed focused on the fix, confident that we’d be able to restore service fast,” she said in the letter.
“Thanks to an incredible amount of hard work and tenacity, we achieved a major milestone last night. We are building on that success and expect to have the rest of service restored this week. Every part of this recovery is being handled with care and precision — we will not rush anything that compromises safety, security or trust.”
Riordan thanked Cellcom’s customers and said the company would cover the time service was down “and then some.” It wasn’t clear from the letter how this will be done.
The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection told Action 2 News it received 15 complaints involving the Cellcom outage between May 17 and late Tuesday morning.
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