AT&T CEO John Stankey expressed disappointment over a rash of network outages and security incidents that have shattered the reputation of one of the longest-standing U.S. communication brands, and touted the company’s response to those incidents despite reports indicating a significant lag in the handling of that response.

“There's nobody more disappointed that we have to actually address your question and work through these issues than I am,” Stankey said in response to a question during the carrier’s second-quarter earnings call this week.

That question specifically pointed to “network outages” and “data breaches.” AT&T’s network suffered a half-day outage in late February that also impacted the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) public safety system running on the carrier’s network, while the carrier earlier this month publicly disclosed that call records for all of its mobile traffic was hijacked during a third-party data breach.

“We are operating in an incredibly dynamic environment on two fronts,” Stankey further explained. “One, we're changing a lot in our business, which is necessary and I'm proud of the changes we've been making and I'm proud of the progress we're making, but it comes with a lot of moving parts. And two, the threat environment we're in is a really, really difficult environment and it's going to get probably more difficult.”

Stankey laid some of the blame for the data breach on “geopolitical dynamics that are going on,” which “are putting pressure on that.” The breach is reported to have occurred on data stored by Snowflake and was carried out by the ShinyHunters group that has ties to Russia.

“Good companies just like ours are all having to learn some new things and are seeing new threats and new environments that they have to adjust to,” Stankey added.

A detailed report from Wired indicates that AT&T paid a ransom to the attacker to have the stolen information deleted.

Stankey proud of AT&T’s response Stankey also stated that he was proud with how AT&T has dealt with the high-profile issues.

“We've been responsive. We've done it in a way that I think we've taken good action to learn from those things internally. We've been transparent with our customers around what the circumstances are. I think we've stood behind our product in those instances,” Stankey said.

That stance was somewhat undercut by a government report this week on AT&T’s network outage, which found the carrier did not notify FirstNet of the situation until more than three hours after all access to the public safety network went down and nearly an hour after the network was back up and running.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report found the network outage was caused by a misconfigured network element that was loaded into the network during a scheduled maintenance window. The misconfigured element quickly caused a cascade of error messages across the network, which went into a “protect mode” that disconnected all devices from the network.

The report did indicate that AT&T prioritized re-connecting FirstNet devices to the network, but that more than 25,000 calls to 911 call centers were not connected.

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.”

That network currently serves more than 5.5 million connections across more than 27,000 public safety agencies.

AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh told attendees at a financial conference shortly after the outage occurred that the network 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.

A Forrester report noted the outage had an estimated $500 million impact on the U.S. economy and AT&T could see up to $1.5 billion in costs associated with the event.

“I'm not dismissing the issue in any way, shape, or form,” Stankey said of the issues. “I view it as very, very important. It's clearly something I don't ever wish to go through, but we've handled it about as well as we can going through it.”