Grand Strand residents concerned about nationwide cell service outage
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) – Tens of thousands of Americans were affected by a nationwide cellular service outage in our country, including some along the Grand Strand.
According to data from an outage monitoring site called Down Detector, AT&T reached around a high of 74,000 outages while Verizon had about 4,000.
One of the employees at the AT&T store off Pine Island Road, said there wasn’t much they could do until corporate engineers at AT&T solve the problem.
Some local stores weren’t even open today, concerning some customers.
A local resident, customer, and concerned parent in Myrtle Beach, Nicole Gannon said she may switch back to Verizon.
“There’s not even anyone sitting here to explain,” Gannon said. “Hey this is what’s going on and it may take us this amount of time, but we can’t even contact anybody.”
The AT&T store off Dick Pond Road had it’s lights off and doors locked all day.
An employee at the store off Pine Island Road, next to Coastal Grand Mall said their store was one of the corporate stores in Myrtle Beach and the other AT&T could be an indirect store.
“I have three little ones in school,” Gannon continued. “And their school has no way to contact me, in case something is wrong.”
The store employee said they can’t give their customers an estimated time of how long it’ll take for the problem to be fixed until it’s identified.
Many customers said it was scary how much people depend on their phones.
AT&T customer, Will Korb, said his phone was showing ‘SOS’ where the cellular bars usually are.
Thursday’s outage also impacted businesses.
“I collect money on my phone for my work,” Korb said. “So that’s not going to be possible to do today.”
Another customer who’s a local resident and Uber Eats Driver, Mark Riecken said due to the outage, he is missing money.
“We’ll pick up and deliver food, you know Chick-fil-a and whatever, and so all of those possibilities are not possible today,” Riecken said. “So, we’re losing money every hour, we can’t do anything.”
Customers told News13 during the outage, they couldn’t access their bank accounts, communicate with their children, or navigate.
“I’m a generation and a half before cell phones, “Riecken said. “But we certainly grow attached to these things. I mean when I was young you used to have to remember all the phone numbers now you don’t have to remember any phone number because it’s in your phone.”
Customers said when they called AT&T Thursday afternoon, the wait times were 7 to 9 hours long.
“I guess I’m going to just keep cutting my phone on and off and hope something transpires,” Korb said.
Customers who had two different services told News13 one phone was working, but another one was not.
There’s still no indication on what caused the outage.
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Jackie LiBrizzi is a multimedia journalist at News13. Jackie is originally from Hamilton, New Jersey, and was raised in Piedmont, South Carolina. Jackie joined the News13 team in June 2023 after she graduated as a student-athlete from the University of South Carolina in May 2023. Follow Jackie on X, formerly Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, and read more of her work here.
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