Nationwide AT&T Cellphone Outage Preventing Some Emergency Calls – When Will It End?

A widespread outage on Thursday morning affected major mobile operators and internet service providers across the country.

Customers from New York to Dallas and San Francisco are reporting major service outages for AT&T, and Verizon and T-Mobile are also experiencing service issues, according to NBC News and CNN.

According to the service monitoring site DownDetector, AT&T customers reported increasing problems, with the largest outage of nearly 75,000 early Thursday. The numbers evened out around 9 a.m. ET, according to the site.

“Some of our customers are experiencing outages in wireless service this morning,” AT&T said in a statement obtained by NBC News. “We are working urgently to restore the service for them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is up and running.”

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In an update around 11:30 a.m. ET, AT&T said it had restored service to about 75% of affected customers.

“Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to the remaining customers,” they told NBC News.

Just after 3:00 p.m., the company announced that the service was down.

It was not immediately clear what caused the service outage.

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Users of affected mobile companies are reporting phones displaying “SOS”, meaning the phone can still access emergency services.

AT&T has reported sporadic outages over the past week, with emergency service temporarily outages in the southeastern US, CNN reported.

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Massachusetts State Police also urged people not to call 911 just to see if the number works.

“Many 911 emergency centers in the state are inundated with calls from people trying to check if 911 is working from their cell phones,” they wrote. in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Please don’t do that.”

“If you can successfully make a non-emergency call to another number through your mobile service, then your emergency service will also work,” they added.

AT&T logo on a cell phone.

Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty

Verizon, which had more than 4,000 outages Thursday, said in a statement that it “continues to monitor the situation” but that its network is “operating normally,” according to NBC News.

“Some customers experienced problems this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier,” the company said.

T-Mobile also says their network is working as it should. “Down Detector likely reflects challenges our users have encountered trying to connect to users on other networks,” the company said, according to the outlet.

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The outage problem may be related to “peering,” or the way mobile services hand off calls from one network to another, according to CNN.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are helping the Federal Communications Commission investigate the cause of the outage.

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Source: HIS Education