Verizon's massive nationwide network outage on Wednesday may have been caused by a failure in just one East Coast state.
Officials believe a network server in New Jersey going down was the likely trigger of the day-long network crash, according to an initial investigation by law enforcement agencies on the East Coast searching for signs of sabotage.
New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan has called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open a probe into the outage, but no signs of tampering or hacking by cybercriminals have been found so far.
However, James Knight of DigitalWarfare.com told the Daily Mail that cyberwarfare experts are very suspicious about this outage being able to spread across the entire US within minutes.
'True single-point failures shouldn't cascade this way in a properly engineered system, and the silence on exact causes only heightens doubts,' Knight explained.
Knight added Verizon's 'built-in redundancies,' including spread out data centers, constant system tests, and multiple routing paths for signals, should have prevented this kind of long-term and widespread service blackout.
'That said, there are no credible signs or evidence this was cyberwarfare, a cyberattack, or foreign interference,' the cyberwarfare expert noted.
'Everyone I've spoken to is either tight-lipped or suspicious,' he told Daily Mail.
Despite the timing, no groups or nations have claimed responsibility for any kind of potential attack on Verizon's server, which Knight said would have been typical for disruptive actors seeking visibility for a major hack.
The telecommunications giant has yet to provide any details on the exact cause of the mysterious blackout, leaving customers without the ability to make calls or send text messages.
On Thursday, Verizon told Daily Mail that all customers affected by the outage would receive a $20 credit to their account, which they will need to redeem using the myVerizon app.