CNN —The news Thursday morning of the AT&T service outage — affecting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of customers — was yet another reminder of the importance of critical infrastructure resilience. By a few minutes after 3 pm ET, about 11 hours after customers’ initial reports of the outage, AT&T said it had restored service to all affected customers. For communications, it can be conceptualized in two different ways: What is the scope and scale of the service outage and what are the cascading consequences of the outage? In a connected world, a widespread communications outage can have a contagion effect. Infrastructure outage incidents can’t be addressed by stove-piping information.

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Persons: Bob Kolasky, —, it’s Organizations: Infrastructure Security, Risk Management, CNN, Bob Kolasky Department of Homeland, Federal Communications Commission, White, Communications, AT, Rogers Communications, Chinese Communist Party, Telecommunications, Carnegie Endowment, International Peace Locations: Exiger, Canada, France, Paris, Puerto Rico, Southeast, Gulf