Americans Across The Country Impacted By Massive Cellular Outage

 Tens of thousands of Americans across the country had their cellular service disrupted earlier Thursday morning as AT&T’s network was reportedly down for over 60,000 customers. 

There were also reports of outages from Verizon and T-Mobile customers. The outages mainly impacted people in Houston, Atlanta, San Antonio, Miami, Dallas, Indianapolis, and Louisville, leaving them unable to call, text, or use the internet on their cell phones, according to tracking site Downdetector. 

The spike in outages first occurred at 3:33 a.m. CST with 32,836 reports of disruptions before dipping at around 5:00 a.m. before jumping back up to around 66,000 by 6:51 a.m., according to Downdector. 

T-Mobile customers also reported nearly 1,500 disruptions, with highest number reported at 6:39 a.m. Around the same time, over 3,500 Verizon customers reported disruptions as well. The Verizon and T-Mobile customers largely overlapped with the areas where the AT&T outages were reported. According to T-Mobile, this occurred because they were attempting to communicate with people on other networks. 

The San Francisco Fire Department said early Thursday morning that it was aware of the service problems saying that people were having trouble calling 911. 

“We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911),” the department said in a post on X. “We are actively engaged and monitoring this. The San Francisco 911 center is still operational.”

 

The department also told people to try call using a landline instead of a cell phone.

“If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911, then please try calling from a landline. If that is not an option then please try to get ahold of a friend or family member who is a customer of a different carrier and ask them to call 911 on your behalf.Do not call or text 911 to simply test your phone service,” the department said. 

AT&T has not yet issued any statements on why the outages have occurred, but a spokesman did tell Fox that the network encourage people to use WiFi calling in the meantime.

“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored,” spokesman Jim Greer told Fox.