Resilience and Recovery: A Look at the Nashville Network Outage

On December 25th, 2020, an explosion outside an AT&T network building on Second Avenue in Nashville caused significant communications disruptions for local residents. The blast damaged the building's power supply and generators, leading to outages in telephone and Internet service that persisted for approximately two days.

Data from Cloudflare’s traffic monitoring reveals a clear sequence of events in the aftermath of the incident. For a period of over five hours following the explosion at 1230 UTC, traffic to Cloudflare from AT&T in Nashville continued to flow, supported by backup battery power. However, a sharp decline became evident at 1748 UTC—close to noon local time—which aligns with reports of widespread service loss among users.

Internet traffic disruption caused by the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville

The disruption was not short-lived. The data shows that Nashville traffic via AT&T only began its recovery over a 45-minute window on December 27, starting at 1822 UTC. This marks the total downtime at 2 days and 34 minutes.

Looking at traffic flow data for AT&T in the Nashville area to Cloudflare we can see that services continued operating (on battery power according to reports) for over five hours after the explosion, but at 1748 UTC we saw a dramatic drop in traffic. 1748 UTC is close to noon in Nashville when reports indicate that people lost phone and Internet service.

Following this period, traffic patterns have returned to normal. No further interruptions have been detected in the network data.

We saw traffic from Nashville via AT&T start to recover over a 45 minute period on December 27 at 1822 UTC making the total outage 2 days and 34 minutes.