The cellular and data system in the USA is incredibly fragile. Some of the equipment I worked with in the past could be issued a command that would shut down all like-minded devices it knew about, and one of the guys I worked with (accidentally) did that in the field taking an area offline before control could re-establish the devices on the network. I doubt stuff like this is as easily accessible as it used to be, but I bet that it's still there. Want to bet that some diversity hire told a backbone system to shut itself down without understanding that "all" means "all?"