AT&T outage was "not a cyber attack"

AT&T says Thursday's outage which left thousands of customers without service and unable to call 911, was "not a cyber attack," the company believes.

Why it matters: Despite threats from nation-state hackers in China and Russia, it's still statistically more likely that a network outage would be caused by misconfigurations or faulty settings.

The FCC, DHS and the FBI were reportedly all investigating the incident on Thursday, which may have led people to assume it was a cyberattack.

White House spokesperson John Kirby said there was "no reason" to think the incident was due to a cybersecurity issue, although AT&T is still investigating the root cause.

"We are continuing our assessment of today's outage," AT&T's website said late Thursday evening.