AT&T service restored after nationwide outage. Feds are looking into what caused it

The White House said several federal agencies are looking into the nationwide AT&T outage that affected tens of thousands of people for several hours Thursday as the phone company announced service has been fully restored.

The FCC said it is aware of the outages and that its Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is investigating the incident.

“We are aware of the reported wireless outages, and our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is actively investigating,” the agency said on X, formerly Twitter. “We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers.”

John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, said the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are also looking into the incident.

“We’re going to look at this really hard,” he told reporters Thursday at the White House. “We’re going to work with industry to see what we can see we can find out, but right now, we’re being told AT&T has no reason to think that this was a cyber security incident.”

Tens of thousands across the U.S. coped with the outage that affected customers from AT&T and other cellphone providers.

Miami, Atlanta, New York City, Chicago, Indianapolis, Houston, Austin and San Antonio were among the cities affected, according to downdetector.com, an outage tracking website.

Around 9 a.m., AT&T had more than 73,000 reported outages, Cricket Wireless had nearly 13,000, Verizon had over 4,000 and T-Mobile had more than 2,000, Down Detector reported. The service interruption started around 3:30 a.m.

AT&T and Cricket Wireless told the Miami Herald on Thursday afternoon that the service was restored to all affected customers. AT&T acquired the parent company of Cricket Wireless in 2014.

“We sincerely apologize to them,” the company said in a statement. “Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”

Earlier, T-Mobile told the Herald it did not experience an outage.

“Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said.

Verizon told the Herald that its network was operating normally.

“Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier,” Verizon said. “We are continuing to monitor the situation.”

The reason behind the outage was not immediately known.