AT&T is in discussions with U.S. government regulators over the carrier’s catastrophic multi-hour network outage that impacted all of its customers, including first responders.

AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh told attendees at a Morgan Stanley Conference this week that “there are” discussions with regulators “and we’ll have to let that process take its due course.”

“Obviously the services we provide in the infrastructure that AT&T provides is really important and it’s critical not only for our nation but for our customers,” McElfresh said. “So, there’ll be follow-on discussions with our regulator the SEC and portions of the government. But that’s not  unexpected and we’re prepared to participate in that.”

AT&T’s network went offline on Feb. 22. While details on what caused the outage remain murky, McElfresh did note the issue came during one of the carrier’s nightly maintenance windows.

“A part of grooming the network and expanding it, we do these kinds of things hundreds of times a night in the maintenance window,” McElfresh said. “It was the incorrect application of a process that created this and at least based on our initial investigation, and we've already taken steps to address that, to prevent that in the future.”

Forrester analysts noted in a blog post that the outage lasted approximately 11 hours “and, based on the impacts of similar outages in the past on areas such as financial transactions and supply chains, we estimate the impact to the U.S. economy at $500 million.”

Forrester also noted “there will be investigations and significant costs to AT&T … and, ultimately, its customers.”

“A chain of events will unfold following the outage, starting with AT&T submitting the official outage root cause report to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission],” the post said. “In parallel, U.S. government agencies will support efforts to rule out any possible cyberattacks.”

The analyst firm estimates AT&T could see up to $1.5 billion in costs associated with the outage.

An important part of AT&T’s network importance to the nation is based on it running the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) public safety network. That network currently serves more than 5.5 million connections across more than 27,000 public safety agencies.

The FirstNet initiative was born out of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that showed a crippling lack of network robustness and the need for a unified communications (UC) network. AT&T was awarded the FirstNet contract in early 2017, which included 20 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band and $6.5 billion in government funding to be used to construct a nationwide 4G LTE network.

AT&T operates the FirstNet network as a “physically separate, highly secure network core that goes well beyond standard commercial network security measures.”

“The majority of the FirstNet network functions are virtualized, running on FirstNet-dedicated cloud hardware deployed within multiple AT&T data centers,” the carrier noted. “The network functions that are not virtualized run on redundant, dedicated solutions.”

McElfresh told attendees at this week’s event that this architecture allowed AT&T to more quickly re-establish the FirstNet service.

“One of the reasons why the recovery of that FirstNet service was very fast … it proved, the design proved accurate,” McElfresh said.

AT&T a week before the outage announced plans to invest another $8 billion over the next 10 years into the FirstNet operation, including upgrades to support 5G-based services.

“We're excited to work with the first responders and the FirstNet Authority because once you have access to 5G, there are incremental things that are available beyond just smartphone-type applications,” McElfresh added.