Cellcom confirms cyber attack to blame for outage

GREEN BAY, WI (WGBW) – A cyberattack caused Cellcom customers’ voice and text services to be out for almost a week. On Tuesday afternoon, Cellcom CEO Brighid Riordan took to YouTube, social media, and the website to provide an update on the outage. 

“We were prepared for this. We are prepared for these incidents, and we are rolling our protocol through this,” said Riordan. “We live in a world where they are working on how to do damage just as hard as we’re working to prevent it. This is the world we live in right now. We have notified the authorities, and we have teams working around the clock.”

Riordan went on to say that the attack did not expose any personal data. 

She gave no timeline for the full restoration of service. “You have our total commitment that we are doing everything we can, along with global experts, our partners, who have flown in from around the world to get this restored. And that’s our priority,” she said.

The website also does not provide a timeline for restoration.

“While we would like to provide a timeline for full restoration, we are unable to share exact milestones with complete confidence. Our team continues to build on the progress shared yesterday and our best estimate is that full service will be restored by or before the end of this week.” 

Cellcom Website

The outage began around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 14. The company restored Cellcom-to-Cellcom voice service and text service on Monday, May 19.